Road Safety Bill [HL]

Perhaps I may add a word or two to what has just been said by the noble Baroness. We are talking about vehicles in a dangerous condition, not necessarily vehicles in a defective condition. If you have attended a vehicle inspection as I have and seen vehicles stopped, you would be horrified by the standards of some vehicles. I remember one instance of a lorry carrying coal from Southampton to Glasgow, which was stopped at Abingdon. I was invited by the vehicle inspector to bend down and look at the tyres. He told me not to touch them, but, by that time, I had done so. The metal of the tyres was exposed all the way around. The tread had gone completely. He said that if he were to take the case to the local magistrates’ court, the driver would be fined £200. He said that that was less than the cost of one replacement tyre. He said, ““The one thing I can do which will effectively punish him is to stop the lorry here, and he will have to manually shovel all the coal out of the lorry into another lorry””. I cannot believe that that driver, be he an employee or the employer, would be ignorant of the fact that the lorry was not in roadworthy condition. Before any driver, be he working for a local builder or a local haulage firm, takes a vehicle on the road, he should make simple checks of the tyres, the lights, the windscreen washers and the like—the sort of things that we are encouraged to do. He should do so because he is a professional driver. The Vehicle Inspectorate is unlikely to prosecute somebody for having a dangerous vehicle because one light is out or one windscreen wiper is not working, but if a person has really taken a dangerous vehicle on to our motorways, he is causing lots of people to suffer risk of serious injury. The Government are right to think fairly seriously about this, but I shall be very interested to hear what the Minister has to say.