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The FTA is calling for an independent assessment to be carried out of the Department for Transport’s (DfT) ‘Freight Data Feasibility Study’ as it believes the figures in the report are “woefully inadequate”.

Published yesterday, the DfT study rejects using a database of foreign vehicles to improve road safety of UK roads. It also rejects the case for a vignette on the basis of a model which attributes meagre benefits to the database in terms of improved road safety, reduced road wear from  overloaded vehicles, and lower levels of congestion resulting from accidents. Over a ten-year period, the study assumes that just one life would be saved; that a trivial £560,000 of property costs would be saved; and that highways damage would be reduced by only £3.3m. The net result is the database would yield just £1.7m of benefits per year.

Simon Chapman, FTA’s chief economist, tells MT: “The industry deserves better than a half-baked report with such weak benefit cases. The DfT and their consultants seem to have got their decimal places wrong and the report appears to undercook the benefits by several orders of magnitude.”

“The research needs to be independently reviewed by a neutral third party,” he adds.

The FTA has informed the DfT of its concerns and has been promised a meeting with the consultants of the report.

“We are currently awaiting a date for the meeting,” adds Chapman.

The report can be downloaded from the  Department for Transport's website.