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Road Safety Bill [Lords]

The hon. Gentleman has phrased a new clause in a way that requires a mirror to display all parts of the road. What I am saying is that my officials believe that the mirrors currently available, and which it is proposed should be fitted to the vehicle fleet—whether by Europe or by anybody else—leave a blind spot to the front and the side of the vehicle, and that nobody has yet devised a solution to that problem. We are going to test Fresnel lenses to see whether they are a solution to the problem. We will distribute them free in a pilot, along with educational material, to discover whether they help people to see the particular blind spot that we think is causing the side-swiping incidents. For that reason, I hope that the hon. Gentleman will agree to withdraw his new clause, and that he will accept my reassurance that we are taking this matter extremely seriously, are pushing ahead and will attempt to solve the problem as quickly as possible. As was rightly pointed out, as I represent a Kent constituency, this matter is of considerable importance to me and I am not going to let it sit on the back burner. I am going to push as hard as I can, but I want a solution that works and that is supported by the evidence—not one that is just a reaction to the knee-jerk xenophobia that says that this must be something to do with foreign lorry drivers with a blind spot on the passenger side.