My Lords, in moving this amendment I shall speak to Amendments 169B and169C tabled by the noble Earl, Lord Atlee.
These amendments came as the result of a truck hitting a railway bridge near Plymouth about a month ago. It affected train services to the south-west quite severely, and I had a discussion with the head of safety at Network Rail to find the cause and what could be done to avoid it happening again. I got some very interesting information, which I will share briefly with the Committee.
As noble Lords probably know, an articulated lorry went under a railway bridge. Interestingly, the road was sloping upwards, so the top of the lorry hit only the far side of the bridge, because the clearance was less than when he went in. When I looked at it further with Network Rail, I was informed that there was an average of seven bridge bashes a day on the network; some are serious and others are not.
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Equally serious was that Network Rail had done a bit of research with the drivers who drive these heavy goods vehicles, and around 50% of them do not know
the height of their vehicle. With all the electronic gadgetry that we have around today, that is pretty unacceptable. Then again, the driver who was driving this particular lorry was on his fourth drive with a truck that day, and each truck was different. It was clear that he was not given proper instructions as to the height of his vehicle or the route he should take.
We may think that it is not terribly important and that there is a shortage of HGV drivers anyway, but if a truck hits a bridge of a particular type—a steel bridge, say—there is a chance that it could move the bridge sideways in relation to the track, which in turn will cause a train to derail. I do not want to get into what happens when a train derails, but it is not a pleasant thing to think about. I suggest that the industry has to find a solution to this problem.
First, one has to reflect on who is responsible. Is it the driver’s fault? He or she—it is usually a he, but it could be a she—should know the height of the truck they are driving, or more likely the height of the trailer behind the tractor unit they are driving. A route should be given to them in advance, and it should of course show the height limits of any structure they have to go under.
Can you blame the driver in these circumstances, when he is under great pressure to get there on time and everything? What about his owner, or the person who commissions the journey? I call them the haulier. Should they not be obliged to tell the driver and give him a route, including electronically? This touches on to the amendments of the noble Earl, Lord Attlee. Should Network Rail and the people who produce the electronic maps and everything not have a duty to put the electronic information on the equipment that the driver uses? It would be nice to think that the driver would actually read it. One hopes that would occur.
There needs to be something to dissuade the haulier and the drivers from going under these bridges, possibly risking a pretty serious accident. We started to think: how could you dissuade them? What about penalties? The problem is that if a serious accident—or a serious incident; it is not an accident any more, but the noble Baroness has gone now—moves the bridge sideways, you have the delays to trains that cost a lot of money, which is normal in the industry, you have the repairs to the bridge and the delays and compensation to passengers, and there may be worse things if it is a serious accident, with damage to the trains and things like that.
Noble Lords will probably have seen the incident that happened at Salisbury about a week ago. It takes a long time to recover these trains, and probably write them off. This is a probing amendment because Ministers may have a better solution, but our feeling is that the driver needs to get some penalty if he or she is found liable, with some penalty points. However, it is probably the haulier who commissions the journey who should be capable of doing it properly, and should therefore receive a fine. What we put in subsection (2)(b) is of course an enormous cost, which I suggest could be recovered only from insurance.
I have just one other point. In subsection (3), it is important to remember that it may not be a Network Rail railway bridge in future; it may be an Underground
railway bridge or a guided transport structure. The key is that it will damage something that runs above the bridge on some kind of a guidance, which, if damaged, would cause an incident, an accident or something like that.
I support the amendment in the name of the noble Earl, Lord Attlee. He will probably be a bit surprised, but I support it because it puts the onus on all parties to come up with a solution. This has to stop. There are seven incident a day in this country; somebody is going to get badly hurt sometime, and I do not think that Network Rail, although it is trying very hard to persuade people, is in the mood at the moment to be the prosecuting authority to put everything right. An amendment something like this one would help Network Rail, and help Ministers as well. On that basis, I beg to move.
Amendment 169B (to Amendment 169A)