Paschal Donohoe (Dublin Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank Senators Power and Byrne for tabling the matter.

I wish to clarify a point made about the nature of this offence and that it was a new one. This has always been an offence. Prior to the change earlier in the year it was five penalty points and direct to court but that has now been changed so that people have the option of a fixed notice payment and three penalty points. The whole objective has been to take things out of the courts system which we do not believe should have to deal with this matter. The big change that was made here was not the introduction of a new offence; it was the bringing in of a new phase of a lower penalty point sanction and giving people the option of settling it before it got to court.

The more significant change that has happened in respect of this, and this is a point that Senator O'Donovan and I were discussing earlier, is the sheer amount of advertising that took place in the run-up to the change. The Road Safety Authority was very proactive in communicating this and it has led to a significant increase in the number of people seeking to book their NCT.

I will again go through the figures I received that led me to support the course of action as it stood then as hopefully they will indicate the scale of the challenge we face in this area. In the last week of November, 25,000 NCTs were done. Some 9,000 of those 25,000 were either late or very late. Of those 9,000, 1,450 were for NCT certificates that were due in 2013. That shows the scale of the challenge that motivated this change in the penalty points regime. As the Senator has said, this is a matter of road safety. It is all about making vehicles safer. That is why this change was brought in.

We have made a number of changes to deal with the spike in demand. The first is that an additional 50 staff have been deployed to carry out the testing. In NCT centres that currently have a particular waiting list, changes have been made to matters like opening hours and the number of services provided. Those two changes took place.

I obtained figures about current waiting times myself, because I have been getting the same level of contact from constituents as Senators have. The average national waiting time is 11 days. I then looked for the regional centre breakdown. This showed that most centres were well inside that 11-day period. The challenge at the moment is that because so much of the booking is done via the Internet, when people go onto the website and see the next available slot, they understandably assume that it is the only available slot. The Road Safety Authority has been saying, and I have been aiding it in its efforts, that the best thing for people to do is to ring up and look for an appointment, for the reasons the Senator has described, namely, the need for their cars to be legal. In the vast majority of cases, the Road Safety Authority is able to facilitate that. Why do I believe that? There has been a great deal of contact about this matter. The reason I believe it is that, as we said a moment ago, if a test cannot be given within 28 days, it must be given for free, and only 2% of recent tests have been given for free. This shows that the vast majority of them have been delivered within 28 days.

I am not in a position to accept Senator Power's amendment because the matter could be tackled in other ways and, given the importance of this legislation, it is not appropriate that this particular issue resides within the Bill. However, if the Leader is amenable to it, I will return to the House in the middle of January, and perhaps in the context of a debate on road safety, transport policy or some such matter, I could give the House a specific update on where we stand by the middle of January on this point.