Clause 21 - Using vehicle in dangerous condition etc.
Road Safety Bill
10:15 am
Mr Greg Knight (Shadow Minister, Environment and Transport; East Yorkshire, Conservative)
I beg to move amendment No. 36, in clause 21, page 24, line 39, at end insert
'and the offender was not an employee driving a vehicle owned by his employer in connection with his employment.'.
I move this initially as a probing amendment to tease out of the Minister why he wants to make the change proposed in clause 21. Clause 21 would make disqualification for using a motor vehicle in a dangerous condition obligatory and not discretionary if the driver has committed a similar offence in the previous three years. Why should a good driver, who is not the owner of a vehicle but merely an employee, automatically lose his livelihood when there may be no culpability on his part? The courts should decide on the basis of the evidence before them, not be ordered by Parliament what view they should take on disqualification. Amendment No. 36 would seek to exempt any offender who was an employee driving a vehicle which was not his from the insistence that a second offender receives an obligatory ban.
There are certain circumstances in which, if one is driving some else's vehicle in the course of your employment, one knows that there is something wrong with it. The most obvious example is that if the brakes are faulty, one immediately knows one is driving a dangerous vehicle. There are many other vehicle defects, however, which are weighty enough to make the vehicle dangerous, but which the driver may not know about, particularly if it is not his vehicle. For example, a badly corroded chassis would not be immediately evident to the driver of a vehicle. If it was a commercial vehicle with a tipping facility on the back, one would not necessarily know if the tipping mechanism was in a dangerous condition. Why should an employee lose his license—and thereby, perhaps, his whole livelihood—when it is entirely the fault of the person who employs him?