Clause 32 - Issue of new registration documents: vehicle identity checks etc.
Vehicles (Crime) Bill
2:45 pm
Mr David Chidgey (Eastleigh, Liberal Democrat)
It is not often that I am mistaken for the hon. Member for Buckingham. I shall savour the experience throughout the long hours of the Committee's sittings. If nothing else keeps me awake, that prospect surely will.
Although the amendments are probing ones, they deal with a genuine worry. Several organisations, not least the AA, have expressed concern about the safety and roadworthiness of vehicles that go through the trade after having been badly damaged or written off—vehicles that go in on one side of the railway arch a wreck and come out the other side a shiny motor car. What one sees of the polished exterior tells very little, if anything, about the safety, roadworthiness and mechanical integrity of the vehicle that one is about to purchase.
A good argument can be made for the introduction of a roadworthiness or safety check on vehicles. In the amendments, we suggest that such a check should become part of the vehicle identification check. I appreciate that that would add another perhaps onerous dimension to the work of the vehicle inspectorate, which is one of the reasons why the amendments are merely probing. However, if we are serious about road safety, it would be wrong for the Bill and the subsequent regulations to ignore the problem, which is directly connected with the second-hand car trade and the repair and rebuilding of vehicles that have been written off and then re-registered.
I suggest that the documentation to be provided under the Bill to confirm a vehicle's identity—the vehicle identity check, or VIC—could make clear also that it does not guarantee that the vehicle is roadworthy. When the Minister starts work on the regulations that deal with the issuing of certificates, it should not be difficult to include a statement to that effect. It will remain the purchaser's obligation to be sure that the vehicle is safe and roadworthy.
I have explained the main construct of the amendments. However, I should like to touch upon a further aspect of the clause—which is meant to deal with the many vehicles written off by insurance companies as being uneconomic to repair, despite the fact that, eventually, many of them are repaired and put back on sale.
The clause is about dealing correctly with the issuance of new registration documents and vehicle identity checks. That is straightforward. However, I draw to the Under-Secretary's attention the fact that probably one third of motor cars on the road are insured not comprehensively, but on a third-party basis. The insurance companies are not interested in those cases. As there is no claim against the insurance companies for repair of those vehicles, they never calculate whether it is economical to repair them. Those vehicles can easily slip through the net, as they are insurance write-offs yet also repaired.