Dangerous Driving

Keith Vaz Excerpts

Monday 27th January 2014 Commons Chamber

[Greg Mulholland]

I thank my hon. Friend for raising that issue. He is quite right. He has exposed to the House yet another area where the law simply does not make sense—it is not common sense.

I have also had to deal with the awful deaths of David and Dorothy Metcalf, who were killed a year after Jamie Still, on new year’s day 2012, on the Stanningley bypass in Leeds. They were an honest, hard-working couple, who had just begun to enjoy retirement. They were hit by a driver—rear-ended—who was speeding at 100 mph. The impact of the crash caused the Metcalfs’ car to be thrown 10 feet in the air before it flipped over. Mr Metcalf died instantly, and Mrs Metcalf some time later in hospital. The driver, Mr Eduard Mereohra, was a Moldovan national in the UK illegally. He had been drinking all night at a party, and even the next morning he had twice the permitted level of alcohol in his system. He had previously been deported for entering the UK illegally, but somehow he had entered the country illegally for a second time. He fled the scene, only to be caught by a heroic bystander, guided by another heroic individual who told the police where the man was fleeing, having witnessed the incident from their house.

When he was caught, Mr Mereohra first tried to deny being the driver. Later he tried to blame David Metcalf for the accident. As if that was not bad enough, to make it even more galling, he had been caught speeding a few weeks beforehand, yet nothing had been flagged up to say that he was here illegally. There was no evidence at all to suggest that he had a valid driving licence, and it could not even be established that he had a national insurance number. I still have not received an answer to that question.

[Keith Vaz (Leicester East) (Lab)]

The whole House will be shocked by the two cases that the hon. Gentleman has brought to our attention. In respect of the second case concerning a foreign national who has committed a crime in our country, were his convictions in Moldova, or wherever he resided, brought to the attention of the court before his sentence, or was there a problem obtaining that information?