Motor Vehicles (Tests) (Amendment) (Coronavirus) Regulations 2020

Lord Berkeley Excerpts

Wednesday 13th May 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Rosser for the opportunity to debate these regulations. The MoT is an essential safety requirement for those who use the road. You can just as easily kill somebody by having a defective car that has failed an MoT as you can with the coronavirus, so the whole regulation needs to be put into perspective. Like my noble friend Lord Rosser, I ask the Minister to explain what exactly is the reason for this. Is it because the testers have too much work doing something else or because the DVLA is not ready to process the information?

As other noble Lords have said, there are something like 23,000 testing centres in this country. I decided to see how easy it would be to get an MoT test this morning. I googled “MoT test” and managed to book a service with a mythical car—I do not drive or own a car—an XJ12, petrol, 2010 model, for two weeks’ time on 22 May. There are probably many other testing centres that would have taken my booking so I cannot quite see the problem of lack of testing facilities—if, indeed, that is the problem.

A period of several weeks or months of not driving one’s car can create an equally serious problem, as other noble Lords have said. One can now drive from London to Cornwall and back in a day; you cannot spend the night anywhere, but you can drive. That is the kind of situation where latent defects in vehicles could pop up.

The other issue I would like to raise with the Minister is that of attributable accidents. In other words, if you have not bothered, frankly, to have an MoT test, you are exempt because of these regulations, and you have an accident where somebody is badly hurt or killed, who is to blame? I would blame the Government for bringing in unsafe regulations when they were not necessary. The Minister will probably have a much better answer to absolve the Government but, after all, somebody will have to pay compensation and that seems very unfair.

Finally, the noble Earl, Lord Attlee, and others have mentioned the problem of PSVs and HGVs, which are not covered by these regulations. As the noble Earl said, they are mostly run by professionals, but there are bad apples in every industry, including PSVs, HGVs and all types of cars and vans. The problem with the bigger vehicles is that they can cause much more damage when they have an accident. Can the Minister explain whether similar regulations have been brought in to absolve PSVs and HGVs from such tests for six months, and with what justification?