Question to the Department for Transport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, whether she has made a recent assessment of the potential merits of requiring decibel readings of exhaust noises to be recorded during the MOT test for motorcycles and other road vehicles.

The Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency (DVSA) regularly publishes data on MOT failures by vehicle type and failure category. Vehicle noise is included within ‘noise, emissions and leaks’.

The full MOT dataset is also available on GOV.UK in anonymised form, so users can carry out their own analysis.

For vehicles and motorcycles, the current visual and audible check as part of the MOT is sufficient to confirm an exhaust is properly silenced, as accurate exhaust noise measurements are not considered practical to measure accurately at all MOT test centres.