Clause 45
Road Safety Bill [Lords]
5:00 pm
Stephen Ladyman (Minister of State, Department for Transport; South Thanet, Labour)
The hon. Gentleman deals with an important issue. I am very proud of the integrity of the DVLA database. The DVLA team do a fantastic job, given the sheer volume of people and vehicles that they have to register. It is true that inaccuracies get into the system and there are a number of ways of dealing with that. First we should continuously compare the information that is recorded on each of the DVLA databases to see how we can improve our data. Secondly, as part of the annual re-registration process, we hope that honest motorists will correct any mistakes in documents from the DVLA and send back the information so that the DVLA’s database can be updated.
As for those motorists who are out to cheat the system and have cloned a vehicle, which sounds as if it were the case with the hon. Gentleman’s constituent, or who are trying to avoid their liabilities in some other way, we have to work very closely with the police to try to stop them. We can now immobilise vehicles when they turn out to have irregularities. We have made available to the police not only the registration database, but the insurance database. There is increasing use of automatic number plate recognition systems, which is another reason, to refer back to the point that the hon. Member for North-West Norfolk (Mr. Bellingham) made on the last clause, why it is important to have readable number plates where numbers are numbers and letters are letters and they all are properly spaced.
As automatic number plate reading systems are increasingly available to the police they can instantly check whether a car is registered, whether the tax disk is up to date and whether the car is insured. We need to work with the police to stop more cars and to impound them if there are any irregularities. Once we start to do that more frequently, and once people start to realise that the consequence of having inaccurate data on the DVLA database at best seriously inconveniences them while they put it right and at worst means that their car is confiscated and they are taken through the courts, I have no doubt that there will be a further improvement in the system.
Like the hon. Gentleman, one of the things I did during the recess was to visit Stockholm to see its road pricing system. Even there I am afraid that the records are not 100 per cent. and a number of individuals who want to cheat the Stockholm road pricing system have started to stick a little sun visor over the top of their number plate which effectively blocks the camera’s downward view of it. There are dishonest people in every society, even in those well ordered Scandinavian societies like Sweden, who will try to cheat the system. We must try to be one step ahead of such people, which is one reason why we have a trial at the moment of electronic tagging of number plates. We are looking at a number of initiatives using microchips and other systems that will perhaps enable us to go to the next level of security at some point in the future and get that database much closer to the 100 per cent. where we need it to be.