EU Council of Ministers confirm desire to exclude bikes from Super MoT


Further to all the other deliberations in Europe over the Super MoT, the Transport Council of Ministers meeting yesterday confirmed that they wished all motorcycles to be excluded and that the Regulation be reclassified as a Directive, so that individual member states would have more room to implement what they chose.

From the PR – “The Council agreed a general approach on a draft directive updating the common rules on periodic roadworthiness tests for motor vehicles. (…) (it) does not retain the Commission’s proposal to extend periodic tests to motorcycles and light trailers and to increase the minimum frequency of checks for older cars and light commercial vehicles from every two years to every year throughout the Union. Member states, though, are free to impose stricter rules.”

The UK will of course keep its MoT for bikes, but if this becomes the final legislative decision, won’t now be forced to separate the testing centre from the repair shop, or introduce all the other excessive ideas that the EU Commission had tabled.

This is a huge victory for our campaign and especially the work of all the FEMA member organisations who pulled together on this and worked to influence their national governments.

The EU Parliament may still argue on behalf of the Commission and the private interests who stood to gain so much from this, but it’s doubtful.

We’d like to thank all of you who took the time to write to MEPs about this. It will be interesting to see how the MEPs respond in the new year, having originally said that they would press ahead because it was bound to increase safety, even though, as with the anti-tampering, there was no evidence to show that it would…