My Lords, I am in a little difficulty on aspects of this, as I was saying to my colleagues before coming to this meeting today. I shall delicately go through my reservations. I accept that trailer safety is very important. As my noble friend has pointed out, in the Hussey case the trailer concerned weighed 2 tonnes. That is a pretty big trailer. I can
understand that where big trailers are involved there is a need for some sort of regulatory arrangement. What troubles me is in Amendments 16 and 18. Amendment 16 says:
“Regulations must provide for the compulsory registration of trailers weighing under 3.5 tonnes kept or used on roads, whether the trailer is being used internationally or only in the United Kingdom”—
in other words, effectively all trailers. Amendment 18 says,
“with inspections of such trailers to be undertaken on an annual basis”.
In other words, a little trailer—one of these aluminium boxes that you buy in Halfords for a couple of hundred quid—would have to go in to some sort of MOT-type station for an annual test. I have to say to my noble friend that I have great difficulty in going down that route. Big trailers can of course do a lot of damage.
The answer to this is to make it mandatory, where you have the clipping mechanism for the trailer, to put a lock and chain on as well. That would give an extra element of safety over and above the mechanism in the male and female, they call them; I do not know the actual term. If you had some sort of chain and lock arrangement on smaller trailers, in my view that would be quite sufficient.
We should be very careful about introducing a system for smaller trailers with an annual inspection that could affect hundreds of thousands of people and put them to what I would call unnecessary expense. People are going to complain that it costs 30 quid to test your trailer every year, and that is after you have registered it as well, and it only cost you a couple of hundred. In my view, when it comes to small trailers the situation would be exactly the same as in Scotland over air rifles. The Scotland Office estimates that there are 500,000 air rifles in Scotland, but I am told that up till now only 15,000 people have taken out licences for them so, if those figures are correct, we have criminalised nearly half a million people in Scotland who have so far failed to take out a licence on air rifles. I am worried about systems where you impose on people responsibilities that, on reflection, we might think are really gold-plating what my noble friend has raised, which is an extremely important issue of safety. I apologise to him if I have in any way undermined his case, but I do so with the greatest of respect.