ROAD TRAFFIC (AMENDMENT) (Hansard, 17 February 1976)

§ Mr. Doug Hoyle (Nelson and Colne)
I beg to move, That leave be given to bring in a Bill to amend the Road Traffic Act 1972.

§ Mr. Russell Kerr (Feltham and Heston)
On a point of order, Mr. Speaker. Some of us would like to hear my hon. Friend make his contribution. May we have greater quietness, please?

§ Mr. Speaker
Order. The hon. Gentleman is quite right. When hon. Members are leaving the Chamber in large numbers, they should do so quietly.

§ Mr. Hoyle
The object of this measure is to make it compulsory for motorists to display insurance certificates on the windscreens of their cars.
At the moment, unless a person is pulled up by the police for a traffic offence or because he is involved in an accident, there is no means of knowing whether he has a current certificate of insurance covering his road vehicle. Unless that happens, and apart from the occasion when he has to apply for a road fund licence, when he has to produce a current certificate of insurance—current at the date in question—a person can drive for 12 months without any certificate at all.
The only figures I have been able to obtain relate to 1974. In that year 1132 146,277 people were prosecuted for driving without insurance. I believe that that is only the tip of the iceberg.
If my Bill were passed, it would mean that anyone could tell by looking at a vehicle whether the owner had a certificate of insurance. It would also make it far easier for the police to detect offenders who continually violate the law in this respect.
In 1974 there were just over 60,000 proscutions of people for driving without road fund licences compared with 146,000 for driving without insurance cover. There is a lesson to be learnt there. If we could detect these people, they would be forced to take out insurance cover. That is very important. We have detector vans going round discovering those who have television sets but no licences for them. That is important, but it would be even more important if we were able to discover those who did not have insurance certificates covering their motor vehicles.
People both inside and outside this House, can be involved in road accidents at any time. Any one of us could lose his life or be severely injured in a road accident, and his wife and dependants would have no recourse against the person driving the car if he had no current insurance certificate. The only recourse would be through the Motor Insurers Bureau, which has been set up to provide funds to protect any person or his dependants if he is involved in an accident with someone who is not covered by insurance.
We are paying in two ways. First, part of the fee paid for an insurance certificate goes towards a central insurance bureau to protect people against these buccaneers who are driving about and neglecting the essential duty of taking out insurance cover. Secondly, there is the tremendous loss to the insurance companies. Taking only the figure of 146,000 prosecutions to which I have referred, this means a loss of between £5 million and £6 million to the insurance companies. I believe that the loss is far greater even than that. I do not suggest that insurance premiums would come down if we could close in on these people, but at least we might be able to make the premiums more stable if we could bring these offenders back into the fold.
1133 The people to whom I refer are the hit-and-run drivers and other offenders who are difficult to trace. If we could identify these people, the insurance companies could load the premiums against them and make the cost of insurance so prohibitive that they might be forced off the road. That would make the roads safer for all of us.
This is a simple measure. I hope that the House will accept it. If it does, we shall not only put these cowboys off the roads, but make the roads safer for all people.