I can confirm that I have received this correspondence from the Irish Road Haulage Association, and that a reply is issuing this week. I would be happy to provide a copy to members of the Transport Committee.
By way of context, the project for a national database to contain information on motor insurance policies is well-advanced. Legislation underpinning it was partially commenced in 2019, since which time the bulk of the necessary data has been uploaded to the database.
However, legislation is necessary to complete certain aspects of the database and is included in the Road Traffic and Roads Bill 2021. Fleet policies are a particular issue, as typically vehicles are added to and removed from fleets quite frequently. Drivers employed by fleets, and therefore covered by fleet insurance, can also change during the course of a year.
In order to maintain up to date details, it is quite reasonable to expect fleet owners to provide updates of data on their drivers and vehicles, so that the Garda can check via the database to see that given drivers and vehicles are in fact covered by insurance. A period of 14 days to allow for the simple process concerned is quite reasonable. In fact, we will not require uploading of data on vehicles which are held in a fleet for less than that time.
