Motor Vehicles (Compulsory Insurance) Bill — House of Commons, 2022-01-28
Topic: Transportation
Peter William Bone (Conservative, Centre-right): I beg to move, That the Bill be now read the Third time I thank my right hon. Friend the Member for Hemel Hempstead (Sir Mike Penning) for giving the Queen’s consent. I thank all those who have supported the Bill, particularly those were selected for and attended the Bill Committee without whom it could not have progressed. I was thinking that to speed things up, I could just say, "This Bill is going to save the average motorist 50 quid a year and is one in the eye for the European Court of Justice", but we probably need to do a bit more than that. The expressions of Opposition Members tell me that I better press on My Bill, which received Second Reading on 29 October last year and passed Committee stage on 5 January this year, deals with an issue that was considered in detail during a Westminster Hall debate entitled "Motor Insurance: Court Judgments" on 22 September 2021. That debate was led expertly by my right hon. Friend the Member for Chipping Barnet (Theresa Villiers), who cannot be here today, but I thank her for all her continued support for the Bill As an aside, when we have presentation Bills, it is a very good idea, if there is not time in this Chamber for us to debate Second Reading for as long as we would like, to obtain a Westminster Hall debate so that we can get the issue discussed at length before coming to this Chamber. That is a very good example of what happened The Bill’s purpose is to remove the requirement for compulsory motor insurance for vehicles used exclusively on private land and for a wide range of vehicles not constructed for road use. People might say, "You don’t have to have motor insurance for vehicles used on private land or for vehicles that are not a motor vehicle." They would be right that that is the interpretation of the Road Traffic Act 1998 that has stood since its inception. That interpretation was held to be correct by the Government, motor insurance and motorists alike, but then along came the ECJ and the Vnuk case In 2014, the ECJ made a decision that confounded the European Union and the British Government. The case of Vnuk extended the requirement for compulsory third-party motor insurance far beyond the scope of the Road Traffic Act. If the ruling is allowed to be enforced in our courts, it will put ordinary people in breach of the law for not having motor insurance for their vehicles used exclusively on private land. To give just a few examples, motor insurance will become compulsory for a golf cart that never leaves the golf course, a ride-on lawnmower that someone uses in their back garden and a tractor-trailer that is never designed to leave the farm. It would also extend compulsory motor insurance to machines that were never intended to be used on any road The Road Traffic Act 1988 requires that motor vehicles intended for use on roads and other public land must be insured. It does not require compulsory insurance for vehicles on private land, nor does it require compulsory insurance for vehicles not intended to be used on roads. The whole purpose of this Bill is to return the law of this land to that envisaged in the 1988 Act.