Road Safety Bill [HL]

My Amendment No. 91 is linked with Amendment No. 90. As the noble Earl said, Clause 20 would make disqualification for using a motor vehicle in a dangerous condition obligatory and not discretionary if the driver has committed a similar offence in the previous three years. What it does not say is how dangerous a vehicle has to be. Before I go on to the main point of the amendment, which is the employee, I would point out that a vehicle in a dangerous condition could be anything from having one tyre that does not fulfil the requirements to a vehicle that is a complete write-off in terms of tyres, engines, lights, ignition and indicators. Therefore, the first flaw with this clause is the fact that the description of the vehicle is omitted. It is pretty harsh that, if three years previously one got a fine for a bald tyre or not having an indicator or back light, one should automatically be disqualified for having one more faulty tyre or indicator. The definition of ““vehicle in a dangerous condition”” needs to be sorted out. The main burden of my amendment is to highlight a difficulty with the legislation. As the clause stands, a good driver who is not the owner of the vehicle but merely an employee would automatically lose his livelihood when there may be no culpability on his part. The courts should decide on the basis of the evidence before them and not be ordered by Parliament to take a certain view on disqualification. The amendment would therefore exempt any offender who was employee driving a vehicle that was not his from the insistence that a second offender receives an obligatory ban. There are many occasions when drivers take vehicles out—builders or people transporting goods from one place to another. They simply collect the vehicle in the depot and take it on. Only the most assiduous employee would crawl over the vehicle first to make sure that it was in excellent condition. There are certain circumstances in which, if one is driving somebody else’s vehicle in the course of employment, one understands and knows that there is something wrong with it. There are many vehicle defects, however, that are weighty enough to make the vehicle dangerous but which the driver might not know anything about, especially if it is not his vehicle. For example, a badly corroded chassis would not be immediately evident to the driver. If it was a commercial vehicle with a tipping facility on the back one would not necessarily know whether that mechanism was in a dangerous condition. Why should the employee know whether the vehicle is in a dangerous condition? Why do the Government want to include a provision in the Bill that could, in certain circumstances, be an attack on an innocent working man working for an employer who was not following the maintenance of his vehicles properly? The worker could find that he lost not only his licence but his livelihood. If his only trade is as a driver, he could be taken off the road by the disqualification and consequently would not be able to work. We should allow the courts to look at the evidence before them. If there was a fault that experts could say would not necessarily be apparent to the driver of the vehicle, why should the driver, who is not the owner, receive an immediate ban? There are many other examples within road driving legislation where there is a differential between the owner of a vehicle and the driver. I recommend that we ensure that that differential remains true of this clause as well.