Clause 9 - All drivers
Road Safety Bill
10:00 am
Mr David Jamieson (Parliamentary Under-Secretary, Department for Transport; Plymouth, Devonport, Labour)
The clause gives effect to schedule 3, which we will come to in a moment. The clause and the schedule introduce a new system of endorsement for all drivers, which will be commenced at a later date than clauses 7 and 8 and schedule 2. When issuing a fixed penalty, enforcers will be able to check a driver's endorsement history by accessing the driving record and not by having to check the counterpart to the driving licence, as the law currently requires. As a result, the counterpart will no longer have any statutory function. Consequently, much of schedule 3 is concerned with the removal of all references to the counterpart from legislation.
As the right hon. Gentleman knows, the current licence in this country—and in many other European countries—gives a person who has passed their test a long period in which they do not have to be subjected to a further test or any sort of medical tests. We ask for self-certification from the older age group for eyesight and other medical conditions. Anybody who develops a serious medical condition has an obligation to inform the appropriate agency. Sometimes medical checks are undertaken, but that does not affect the majority of drivers.
There has been a discussion on this issue in Europe and one of the proposals was to have the driving licence renewed at more frequent intervals; five and 10 years were suggested. I can tell the right hon. Gentleman that we have resisted that most strongly. We have done so because we know that the people who are at the greatest risk of having a collision are those who have just passed their driving test and are in the first one or two years of driving. Younger—or at least newer—drivers who have collisions tend to be in those early days. The longer people have been driving, the fewer collisions they have. They become more experienced.
Some other issues have been raised with us. For example, we test cars after three years, or every year, but often, because of their servicing history, they do not need testing. In this country, few collisions happen because the vehicle is in poor condition. In fact, 95 per cent. of collisions occur because of driver error or deficiency, not the state of the road or of the vehicle. Some people argue that we should test the driver more often, rather than testing the car. We are not persuaded about more regular testing for drivers—certainly not on a five-year spectrum—because experience shows that the more experience a driver has, the fewer collisions he or she has.