Question to the Department for Transport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, with reference to the evaluation of the longer semi-trailer trial: annual report 2015, published in August 2016, whether the information supplied by haulage operators on minor injuries and damage to street furniture arising from longer semi-trailers has been independently verified.

The entire trial evaluation is being carried out by an independent consultant, Risk Solutions which collects the data, liaise with the operators and analyse the results before reporting to the Department for Transport. The annual reports produced by Risk Solutions are published by the Department without further editing. Risk Solutions maintains its independence strongly, reviews major departmental statements regarding the trial and results and challenges wording or claims strongly if they are not fully supported by the evidence.

All injuries reported by the operators, including minor/slight injuries, are checked against the national STATS19 data, which is collated from submissions by police forces. Risk Solutions has details of a very small number of incidents involving very minor injuries reported by the operator or by the injured party, but where the police did not attend and the injured party did not attend hospital. These are incidents which, had they involved standard trailers, would not have been reported or counted in any official data, but have been included in the LST trial injury statistics.

Studying incidents where there is no injury (and hence no police report) is challenging since there is no national standard process or format for recording such events. Any study of such incidents for longer semi-trailers (LSTs) requires that there also be a comparative dataset for non-injury incidents involving other long, articulated HGVs. Risk Solutions engaged with a small sample of operators to analyse their in-house data on all incidents to see whether LSTs were over or under-represented in the data. The results from that exercise are explained in the latest annual report. Risk Solutions are currently engaging with a larger sample of operators to expand this dataset and anticipate publishing those results in the next annual report.