Clause 45
Road Safety Bill [Lords]
5:00 pm
Owen Paterson (Shadow Minister, Transport; North Shropshire, Conservative)
I understand that the intention is to tighten up on various practices, particularly fiddling with odometers, or clocking, which obviously is a serious problem. The Conservatives support the Government’s attempts to ensure accurate data for people who are purchasing a motor car.
The clause raises the question of the accuracy of DVLA data, and I do not envy the DVLA in its task. It wrote to a member of the public giving information from its database in March last year. It holds in excess of 36 million vehicle records and 47 million driver records, and reckons that 68 per cent. of those records are correct in every detail and that 22 per cent. contain spelling mistakes in name, address, details or postcode. It considers those to be minor errors which do not prevent mail from being delivered or prevent the police or manufacturers from tracing vehicles. It reckons that that amounted to a 90 per cent. traceability level from the information on the vehicle database. It made the point that it is totally dependent on the motoring public for much of its information.
It is not difficult to work out that with 36 million vehicle records, 47 million driver records and its best accuracy level of 97.5 per cent., 900,000 vehicle records and 1.175 million driver records must be inaccurate. With a perfect record rate of 68 per cent., 11.52 million vehicle records and 15.04 million driver records are not perfect. With a 90 per cent. traceability rate the figures are even easier to work out: 3.6 million vehicle records and 4.7 million driver records are not traceable.
I do not envy the DVLA in trying to keep track of those records, but I should like to know the Minister’s thoughts on how the system can be tightened up because there are press reports of people deliberately driving around with inaccurate number plates. One of my constituents was the proud possessor of an ancient series 1 Cortina which, on a good day when it was warmed up, might have got as far as Shrewsbury—perhaps I am being rude about the car. He was clocked three times for breach of the congestion charge and I had to take the matter to the Mayor because it was obvious that someone had used his registration number. There are anecdotal records of a substantial number of people driving around deliberately using illegal and inaccurate number plates to avoid the congestion charge, speeding fines and so on. That seems to be a growing trend, although I have no figures on it.
What is the Minister’s opinion on the lessons that could be learned from other countries? I was recently in Germany where there is a tight system under which the number plate follows the owner. When people buy a new car, they must hand over the documents for their insurance and for their equivalent of the council tax, which is a local tax showing their domicile, which then attracts the three letters—one letter in large towns— showing where the owner lives. That may be bad luck on the Singhs who are looking forward to buying a number plate at auction, because that system wipes out personalised number plates. Also, importantly, there is the MOT test—in Germany it is a TUV—when the vehicle is three years or more old. When the vehicle is sold the number is surrendered and a new number is created for the new owner. A similar system operates in America, which I have not yet inspected, where each number plate includes an insurance sticker and an annual sticker and is handed out by the state authority.
Our current system, as the lady from the DVLA said, depends entirely on the motoring public for information and is not 100 per cent. accurate. I repeat that I do not envy the DVLA its job, but if we are to have proper enforcement and to clamp down on the hard core of really bad drivers we must have an accurate database, and there are lessons to be learned from the German and American systems. I was in Sweden recently where the road pricing scheme in Stockholm is similar to that in Germany. It simply cannot work without accurate data.
The Government are all over the shop on road pricing and if we are ever to have a new road pricing scheme it must have a cast iron, accurate database. We fully support the Government’s aim to clamp down on the hard core, but that seems to be extremely difficult when the current system is not as watertight as it might be and as I am told it is in other countries. I should like to hear the Minister’s comments on that, but in general we support the clause and its attempt to tighten up on inaccurate mileage on second-hand cars.