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The Freight Transport Association (FTA) is urging the European Commission (EC) to include LGV-specific offences in its proposal to facilitate the prosecution of drivers flouting the law outside their member state. The call comes after the European Union's transport chief unveiled plans to reduce the number of foreign drivers evading prosecution.  The proposal will see technical measures and legal instruments put in place to identify and prosecute EU drivers for offences committed in member states other than that in which their vehicle is registered.

However, the offences that the proposed Directive covers are not specific to LGVs, such as speeding, drink-driving, not wearing a seat-belt and failing to stop at a red light. The EC says it wants to see a system introduced within the EU which will make it easier to deal with these offences across national borders because they are frequently the cause of accidents. But FTA policy and communications managing director James Hookham says "a lack of political boldness and imagination" is preventing foreign LGV drivers that break the law being prosecuted.

Hookham says: "The EC's proposals need to be extended to the operators of visiting heavy goods vehicles and cover such matters as vehicle condition and drivers' hours rules. "When unsafe foreign vehicles and drivers  are stopped there is no easy way to trace the operator or employer and deal with the causes rather than the symptoms." Hookham says this could be achieved through supplying in advance the details of the ownership and origin of all foreign-registered trucks entering the UK this could be paid for through a vignette charge on each vehicle.

The FTA's head of road freight policy, Joan Williams, adds: "The only way you are going to enforce properly and have fair competition is to share information. At the moment the sharing of information is patchy. This is a beginning of a process [but] it aligns with the principle we have been asking for: the exchange of information."