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Road Safety Bill [Lords]

The hon. Gentleman is right to talk about the core group. If he bears with me, I shall come on to that because it is the central part of the problem that we face. In the spirit of congeniality, let me say that the Government have done some smart things. We welcome those and want them to continue. The 20 mph speed limit in urban areas has made a difference. It is and will be the right thing to do in quiet residential side streets. The Government were right to champion safe routes to schools. We all want improvements to the way in which our children get to school, and changes to ensure that they do so as safely as possible. However, the hon. Gentleman puts his finger on the real issue: the Bill does not fully get to grips with the most significant part of the challenge that we face. In Britain, well over 1 million cars—a large number of drivers, indeed—are being driven around outside the confines of the law in a systematic way. In doing so, those people are placing law-abiding British people at risk. They have no insurance and are registered at false addresses. They ignore MOT requirements and fake or ignore tax discs. They are unlicensed and have often never bothered to learn to drive. They may be driving cloned vehicles—a big challenge in many of our cities—whereby they have deliberately stolen the identity of others so that they can offend with impunity. In many areas, those unlicensed and uninsured cars ply for minicab business on our streets. All too frequently, those cars and their drivers, who operate outside the law, kill or maim. Research shows that they are 10 times more likely to have been convicted of drunk driving, six times more likely to have been convicted of driving an unsafe vehicle, and three times more likely to have been convicted of driving without due care and attention. The Bill does not set out a clear enough strategy to deal with the problem. Of course, there are welcome steps in it and it contains things that will help to make a difference in tackling the problem. The measures on uninsured vehicles are sensible, but much more could be done to tackle the problem of uninsured drivers. For example, a £100 fine is not sufficient to address the problem of an uninsured car sitting in the street, undriven, outside someone’s house. The British Insurance Brokers Association describes the measure as ““totally insufficient””.