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Are foreign hauliers more dangerous than UK operators? It is a tricky question to ask nowadays. Easy assumptions of British superiority in all things are long gone and criticism of foreigners is often regarded as narrow-minded or even racist. But there is now some concrete data on which to base any assessment of whether foreign drivers and trucks are any more dangerous than their UK equivalents. For the past 18 months Vosa has been running targeted checks on international vehicles in the UK and  has now issued statistics comparing the prohibition record of different European countries (see table).

Several things emerge from these figures. One is that there is clear support for the anecdotal evidence that foreign trucks are on average less well maintained than their UK competitors. Another is that foreign drivers from some European countries are more likely to break drivers' hours rules. Crucially, however, there are distinctions to be made between the performance of different countries. This is not just a question of 'UK good, foreigners bad', but the statistics are clear enough to give hauliers and organisations more confidence about expressing their views.

Geoff Dossetter, director of external affairs at the Freight Transport Association (FTA), says: "Five years ago I'd have been wary of condemning foreign vehicles on UK roads, but with the Vosa statistics, it has become clear that operating  standards in some countries are much lower." That is not to say there are not many good and safe firms operating trucks in the UK, adds Dossetter. Peter Cullum, head of the international section of the Road Haulage Association (RHA), agrees. He says "there are many good foreign drivers and operators" but concedes that the figures are damning.

Cullum adds: "We accept the figures revealed by Vosa's South-East pilot, which looked at truck and trailer road worthiness and found that foreign operators were particularly worrying." "By and large it is the new entry countries that have the biggest issues with enforcement. We don't have much problem with the French, for example it is more of an Eastern European problem." Cullum's point is easy to support. A comparison of prohibition rates on goods vehicles checked by Vosa shows a 33.91% rate on UK vehicles between June 2006 and May 2007, against a 56.68% rate on vehicles from Romania, 52.6% from Estonia and 62.28% from the Czech Republic. Eastern Europe is not the only poor performer: Portugal saw a prohibition rate of 61.75% and Greece 52.63%. On the other hand France (31.44%) and Turkey (32.11%) both did fractionally better than their UK colleagues.

It is a similar story on drivers' hours prohibitions. The UK rate on more than 50,000 vehicles checked was 10.31% between June 2006 and May 2007. The Romanians were nearly three times as bad (32.27%), the Greeks worse (40.2%) and the Turks less impressive here (36.13%) than they were with truck maintenance. These figures look even worse for the poorly performing countries if you consider that Vosa uses past performance as a guide to which UK operators it stops, while taking a random approach with foreign operators for whom it has less information. As Cullum says of the South-East pilot: "Essentially it found that a random selection of foreign operators were worse than a targeted section of UK operators that Vosa knew to have bad records."

But a Vosa spokeswoman urged caution with this interpretation, because information on foreign operators is now being built up to give Vosa inspectors the best information on deciding who to check. Such an improvement will be welcomed by the RHA and the FTA, which continue to argue that poorly regulated vehicles from the Continent not only put UK operators at a competitive disadvantage but are unsafe. Theo de Pencier, FTA chief executive, says: "Last year injuries and fatal accidents involving LGVs totalled 11,336, of which 1,072 involved foreign-registered vehicles. Although foreign vehicles represent 4% of lorries on UK roads they are involved in 12% of accidents."

The FTA calculates that the annual cost of casualty accidents related to foreign trucks is £100m and that better information on foreign trucks would help reduce this. The FTA also recently criticised government delays on recording data designed to help Vosa and other enforcement authorities. It says it is disappointed that two years after the Burns Report into freight taxation and competition, "the Department for Transport Feasibility Study into future enforcement and taxation has failed to produce any meaningful response".

However some measures are being taken to monitor and improve the record of foreign hauliers. Not only is Vosa increasing its enforcement efforts, but other countries are being approached directly. In July a team including Vosa, the FTA and the RHA visited Romania to help with advice on road safety. Among other things the Romanians were left with FTA compliance guides for operators, handbooks for drivers and other materials to be translated and circulated throughout Romania. UK hauliers will be hoping they are actually read.