Maria Eagle MP (Labour, Garston and Halewood) has asked for the introduction of a bill limiting the age of tyres used by coaches and buses.
The Bill would make it unlawful to operate a PSV with tyres that exceed the age of 10 years, and would require the annual MOT to check and record the age of the tyres. Traffic Commissioners would be given powers of enforcement to sanction any PSV operators found to be using tyres more than 10 years old.
Maria Eagle highlighted an incident in 2012, where three people were killed while travelling on a coach from Bestival, an annual music festival on the Isle of Wight. The crash was caused when the front nearside tyre of the coach burst on the northbound A3, causing the vehicle to swerve out of control, mount an embankment and strike a tree.
A coroner found that the crash was caused by a 19 and a half-year-old tyre that had recently been fitted to the coach. It had 40% of its tread intact and was thus being used entirely lawfully, yet the coroner found, on the basis of the evidence before him, that it had burst catastrophically because it had perished by reason of its age.
