§ Mr. Patrick ThompsonTo ask the Secretary of State for Transport when he intends to respond to the proposals put to him by the Director General of Fair Trading to combat the practice of clocking vehicle mileages.
§ Mr. Peter BottomleyI have today written to Sir Gordon Borrie. A copy of the letter has been placed in the Library.
While deploring this criminal practice the Government do not believe that the expensive system proposed for collecting and storing data in order to deter clocking would be sufficiently reliable to warrant the cost arid bureaucracy involved. The mileage information would not carry conviction with the public. We believe it may be possible to devise a voluntary alternative scheme that is more accurately targeted against vehicles more susceptible to clocking, for instance relatively new, high-mileage vehicles. It has been suggested to the Office of Fair Trading's used car working group that further work should be done on the circumstances and vehicles most likely to lead to clocking, and the true scale of the problem.
Services are already provided by private sector companies to investigate mileages where prudent purchasers wish to double-check on condition and value before buying. These could meet the public's needs better than the blanket system proposed by the group. We believe that the industry can do more to develop an odometer which cannot be covertly tampered with or replaced.
It would be better to make clocking much more difficult at the outset than create a burdensome system that still cannot guarantee to detect the offence. There is much that the industry can so more cost-effectively do than Government to combat clocking.