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Road Safety Bill [Lords]

I come now to some of the hon. Gentleman’s comments. I shall give him an opportunity to intervene in a moment. I shall be very rude about him and I expect he will want to intervene. When he spoke about passenger-side mirrors, he claimed an expertise which I am not convinced he has. We are not talking about passenger-side mirrors. Of course lorries must have passenger-side mirrors. We are talking about an additional close proximity mirror, which will be required by law—the same laws and rules to which the Opposition object—to be fitted in new vehicles from January next year. The new clause would require us to make that mandatory now. By the time we have Royal Assent and we have done all the paperwork and got the lawyers involved, it will be quicker to wait for the new European requirement to be introduced in January. The hon. Member for Monmouth kept speaking about passenger mirrors. We are not dealing with passenger-side mirrors. Neither he nor the hon. Member for North Shropshire correctly referred to them as close proximity mirrors. They and other speakers implied that the problem that we face with the side-swiping of vehicles would disappear once close proximity mirrors were fitted. I challenge that, although I think close proximity mirrors will have a role to play in reducing the incidence of side-swiping. The hon. Member for North Shropshire gave the statistics for the number of accidents caused by side-swiping as vehicles change lane. What he did not tell the House was that 80 per cent. of vehicles involved in such accidents already had close proximity mirrors fitted. So close proximity mirrors are not the solution—or at least they are not the only solution—to this problem. That is why the Department for Transport has been showing real leadership across the European Union in exploring the question of what is the genuine blind spot that causes these accidents. We are about to start a trial with a Fresnel lens, which we will distribute to a number of lorry drivers coming into some of the channel ports, because we believe that such lenses allow the driver to see not the blind spot that close proximity mirrors reveal, but a blind spot that appears to exist to the side and just to the front of heavy goods vehicles. If that experiment is successful, we will have gone a long way toward preventing side-swiping. Close proximity mirrors will reduce some of the problem and they will be fitted from the start of the new year, but we should not kid ourselves or anybody else that they will be the solution to the problem, because, as the statistics show, 80 per cent. of side-swiping incidents are caused by vehicles that already have close proximity mirrors. I should also point out to the House that none of the four fatalities caused by this sort of accident involved a foreign-registered vehicle; they were all British vehicles.