Question to the Department for Transport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, whether his Department is taking steps to tackle the use of car exhaust outputs which go over the legal noise limit of 74 decibels.

The Government is keen to support police and local authorities in using their existing powers to tackle excessively noisy and illegally modified vehicles.

The Department has also recently conducted trials of the latest noise camera technology, the results of which will be published shortly.

The annual vehicle MOT test requires an inspection of the state of repair of the exhaust and the tester uses their experience to make a subjective assessment of the noise levels. A vehicle should fail the MOT if the silencer has been altered to increase noise above the level expected from a standard system.