Road Safety (Financial Penalty Deposit) (Appropriate Amount) Order 2009

We, too, welcome this long overdue system of equalising the penalties faced by foreign lorry drivers. I take what the noble Earl, Lord Attlee, has said, but this is aimed mainly at HGV drivers who have been using our roads free of charge and then flout the law. Through Questions asked by my noble friend Lord Roberts of Llandudno, I have established that in north Wales many thousands of lorries flout these regulations each year. It is not a trivial problem. It goes to the heart of fair competition and is very unsafe. The Minister may recall that a Portuguese lorry driver was sent to prison two weeks ago—not for long enough, I believe—because his lorry ran into the back of a car carrying a family of six, including four children. That is the sort of unsafe behaviour we are trying to deal with here. Many of my questions have already been asked by the noble Earl, Lord Attlee. Under the new order, the quoted fines in courts are too low for the reason given by the noble Earl. I am talking about fines imposed on lorry drivers, not fines imposed on motorists who have done something fairly trivial in towns. I believe that the penalties have to be proportionate. Perhaps the Minister will reflect on the fact that if a lorry is unavailable for a day’s work as a result of being immobilised, the penalty to the owner and/or the driver will be far more significant than any fine that might be imposed. Several hundred pounds of revenue will be lost each day the lorry is off the road. How will the fine be paid? It has to be paid, otherwise the system will fall into disrepute. How are people who consistently and flagrantly breach the law to be dealt with? If the Minister goes back through Questions I have asked, he will find that some Irish drivers have been stopped, fined and prohibited as many as 10 times in a year. I would like to think that if the offence for which we are prosecuting people is repeated, there is a mechanism by which the gravity of the offence might be taken into account. We can dwell on the niceties of affecting the haulier or the driver, but people are being killed and seriously injured as a result of the fact that these regulations have not yet been introduced. Finally, I turn to mobilisation, a nice term that I presume means clamping. There is talk about a fee for clamping, but there is no talk about a fee for unclamping. An officer might have to travel some distance, perhaps at night, at the expiry of the period of rest that the driver has to take, when the driver has adjusted his load or when he has put the mechanism defect right. I believe that the penalty for release should at least reflect in full the costs associated with the offence.