FTA and RHA call for compulsory identification at point of entry .

Freight Transport Association and the Road Haulage Association are calling on the Government to introduce a system of collecting information from visiting lorry operators and drivers.

With one in seven of the heaviest lorries on UK roads now coming from overseas, FTA and RHA believe that it is no longer acceptable that UK enforcement authorities do not have direct access to information on the compliance record of the vehicle and driver in the same way as such information is available regarding UK vehicles. Enforcement statistics produced by VOSA following Operation ‘Atlanta’ in April 2006 suggest that foreign vehicles are more likely to be overloaded, driven longer than is safe and in an unsafe condition than UK vehicles.

The proposal put forward by the two associations is for a simple system of pre-registration for lorries entering the UK, providing basic details of the vehicle’s ownership, registered place of business, date of the last annual test and roadworthiness inspection, the origin and destination of the load and the time and date of arriving and leaving the UK. In future such a scheme could be subsumed into a formal European database exchange