Government fails to take action on regulating foreign haulage trucks
Date: 10 October 2007
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The Freight Transport Association (FTA) is disappointed that the government is failing to take action in terms of regulating foreign freight haulage vehicles.
The Department for Transport (DfT) study into enforcement and taxation found that various options fail to provide value for money because their benefits would be "relatively limited", but the FTA suggests its authors clearly have no idea what is going on on the UK's roads.
The group's chief executive, Theo de Pencier, pointed to the government's own road casualty statistics for 2006, which showed that 1,072 of heavy goods vehicle accidents resulting in injury or death involved foreign freight haulage trucks, out of a total of 11,336 crashes.
Even though only four per cent of trucks on the UK's roads are foreign-registered, these stats show that overseas lorries were involved in 12 per cent of the accidents.
"There can be no doubt that the provision of more and better information as foreign lorries enter the UK would substantially aid our enforcement authorities and help to reduce these poor figures," Mr de Pencier said.
"We seem to be taking an interminable time in coming to what would seem to be a relatively simple issue of collecting this important data and I very much hope that when the conclusion of this study is published later this year we will see something rather more positive than we have seen today."
He also noted that foreign HGVs have an advantage when it comes to fuel costs, with Brit haulage firms feeling the pinch even more now that fuel duty has been hiked.
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