National Accident Prevention Strategy

Baroness Crawley Excerpts

Thursday 17th July 2025 Grand Committee

Asked by

[Baroness Crawley]

To ask His Majesty’s Government what plans they have to create a national accident prevention strategy, as set out in the report by the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents, Safer Lives, Stronger Nation: Our Call for a National Accident Prevention Strategy, published November 2024.

[Baroness Crawley (Lab)]

I begin by thanking noble Lords for taking part this afternoon. It is really appreciated.

I was recently asked to be a vice-president of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents, RoSPA. I am delighted to see my noble friend Lord Jordan here, as he is the lifetime president of that same organisation. There you are—forever young.

This is a body that has been at the forefront of accident prevention for more than 100 years, with landmark campaigns leading fairly directly to legislation, from its campaigns in 1917 for pedestrians to face oncoming traffic through to the Highway Code and the Green Cross Code, cycling proficiency and compulsory seatbelts in 1981—gosh, it seems so long ago now—as well as banning hand-held mobile phones while driving, up to the report in front of us today. Imagine the entire O2 arena, with all 2,000 seats filled; now imagine that crowd wiped out, not once but every single year. That is how many lives we estimate we lose in the UK to accidents. These are not rare events; they happen every day in our homes, on our roads, and in our workplaces and communities.

The Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents reports accidental death rates surging by 42% over the past decade. It was that figure that led me to think that we need a wider parliamentary debate about this. This is not just a statistic, it is a crisis: a national failure of co-ordination, leadership and investment. I say to my noble friend the Minister, whom I respect greatly, that we really need government to champion a national co-ordinated approach to accident prevention, because the current system is just not working.

As the Minister will know, responsibility for accident prevention is currently fragmented across multiple departments: Health, Transport, Education, Housing and so on. This fragmentation leads to gaps, duplication and missed opportunities. There is a chart in RoSPA’s report, of which there are copies on the back table for anyone who wants to have a look, of the overview of government departments and agencies responsible for accident prevention, and it looks like the web of a crazed and demented spider. I would bet that no one in this Room could make head or tail of it.

I believe, too, that accident prevention aligns directly with this Government’s priorities. The NHS 10-year plan, Fit for the Future, for instance, rightly focuses on prevention and early intervention—but injury prevention must be part of that, and part of the vision of that policy, and I am not convinced that it is. Reducing unintentional injuries will lower emergency admissions, free up NHS capacity and improve population health outcomes.

We also know that accidents disproportionately affect people from more deprived backgrounds, making them a clear example of the health inequalities that the NHS 10-year plan sets out to tackle. RoSPA calculates that the cost to the NHS of treating accidents is nearly equivalent to the cost of treating obesity, and twice the cost of treating conditions related to smoking.

The Get Britain Working White Paper that the Minister will be very familiar with identified 2.8 million people out of work due to long-term sickness. Many of these cases stem from preventable injuries. A more co-ordinated approach in government to health and employment accident prevention will keep more people healthy and in work. It will reduce benefit dependency and ensure that local authorities are more financially supported in designing safer communities.

Of course, we have the Employment Rights Bill going through the House of Lords at the moment. It offers a real opportunity to improve workplace safety. Day-one sick pay rights will reduce presenteeism and injury risk. The new fair work agency will enforce safe working conditions and whistleblower protections.

As well as the opportunities inherent in the Government’s agenda, there are also opportunities for getting better co-ordinated data into the area of accident prevention. At present, data is siloed, inconsistent and incomplete. Without robust data, we cannot target interventions, measure impact or hold systems to account. Australia’s national injury surveillance unit shows what is possible and it is a good example for us. It would make sense for the Government to encourage standardised reporting across the four nations. At the moment, we cannot compare data across England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. We should invest in real-time data infrastructure, as well as having an annual injury report published.

RoSPA’s headline call to government is for a national accident prevention strategy led by a named Minister, perhaps a departmental Minister who already has a portfolio, or a Cabinet Office Minister. I would like to put a few questions to my noble friend the Minister before I close. Does she agree with a named Minister heading up co-ordination? Does she think this is an area for co-ordination of data across the four nations of the UK? What provisions in the NHS 10-year plan actually address accident prevention? Can the Get Britain Working reforms be levered to reduce injury-related worklessness? Does she agree with empowerment through education, embedding accident prevention across the whole life course, from early years to old age, in schools, workplaces and communities?

I will leave noble Lords with RoSPA’s current costings for serious accidents. I found it slightly unbelievable when I first read it. Having had a deeper dive, with the help of the RoSPA team, who are sitting at the back, I understand that it is probably a conservative estimate. It estimates £12 billion as the annual cost of accidents, which is evenly split between the cost to the NHS and the cost to businesses.

Around £6 billion is attributed to NHS treatment costs, based on hospital bed days and A&E attendances, and the remaining £6 billion reflects lost productivity, calculated from working days lost due to injury, post-discharge recovery and time taken off by carers, adjusted to include the wider business impact of staff absence. For an economy in search of growth and a population in search of answers to needless and rising injury and death, this needs serious investigation.

Covid-19: People Living in Poverty

Baroness Crawley Excerpts

Thursday 30th April 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Crawley (Lab)]

My Lords, for most of us the Covid-19 lockdown is an uncomfortable inconvenience, but for the more than 4 million children living in relative poverty in the UK it is a time of heightened anxiety and possibly even hunger. Will the Minister tell us the Government’s response to the jolting statistic that only 4% to 5% of vulnerable children who should be in school during the pandemic are turning up? Where are they and how are they doing? I am sure that she shares my concern. What is the Government’s response to the more than 1 million people who have claimed universal credit and are still waiting for payments? Are the Government confident that the National Voucher Scheme is now working properly after the initial delays and that the vouchers are now being accepted by all eligible supermarkets? We cannot look back on this time and have to say, “Most of us got through it, but the poor paid the price.”

International Women’s Day

Baroness Crawley Excerpts

Thursday 7th March 2013 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Crawley]

My Lords, I want to use my few moments to share with you some initial thoughts on the theme of respecting women in 2013. I add my thanks to the noble Baroness, Lady Stowell of Beeston, for initiating the debate and especially for her moving story of the redoubtable Julie of Beeston. The people of Beeston are dying to support her. I also warmly welcome the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Coventry to our House, particularly his support for women bishops. He has his work cut out.

A glance around our world on International Women’s Day will show us that one in three women will be raped or beaten in her lifetime. According to UN Women, up to 70% of women in some countries face physical and/or sexual violence in their lifetime. In addition, some 140 million girls have suffered female genital mutilation, and millions will be subjected to forced marriage and trafficking, as referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Sheikh. We live in a world that most definitely does not respect women.

However, there is hope. Michelle Bachelet, the executive director of UN Women, pointed out this week that over the past few months, men, women and young people have taken to the world’s streets with signs aloft bearing the legend, “Where is the justice for women?”. They have declared solidarity with the Pakistani teenager, Malala Yousafzai, who is recovering in Birmingham, having been shot at point-blank range by the Taliban for defending the right of women to be educated. The demonstrators pledge justice for all raped women, including in the terrible cases in India and South Africa, as well for as the countless abused women who never make the headlines. The One Billion Rising campaign is truly a global fightback, as my noble friend Lady Nye has said, demanding renewed respect for women, with marches in Afghanistan, human chains in Bangladesh, dancing and singing events in Egypt, events in 126 cities in Germany this year, actions in the workplace through protest, and dance and the arts across the world, from Somalia to Australia.

War and sexual violence were ably debated yesterday in the name of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Wakefield, and we must remember that poverty is a close relative of violence against women. It is crucial for the Government to remain true to the achievement of the millennium development goals in this respect, as the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, said. Will the Minister report to us on progress towards the anti-poverty targets in those goals?

While we support campaigns and call for international targets to be achieved and aid budgets to be protected, we can of course apply even more pressure to implementing UK law where it exists to protect girls and women. I am thinking of the law already on the statute book, the intention of which is to protect little girls in this country at our state schools from the lifetime horror of female genital mutilation. The campaigning work on FGM of my noble friend Lady Rendell is rightly to be acknowledged, as is the work of the present and previous Governments on this issue. I welcome the Government’s announcement this week of £35 million towards the eradication of FGM. It is a national disgrace that some 24,000 girls living in Britain—some put the figure far higher—are under threat of being taken out of the UK to be tortured in this barbaric procedure. Why, we must ask, after 30 years of law on this issue, have there been no prosecutions? I would like to hear from the Minister what the Government are doing to encourage prosecutions. I am not claiming that the issue of FGM is anything but complex and multifaceted, but surely bringing prosecutions must at least be part of the mix of solutions to this shameful practice.

Also close to home, our attention in the political arena has been drawn to how we respect pregnant women in this country. The Autumn Statement heralded a cut of £180 a year from pregnant mothers who take maternity leave and care for their babies. It is just over 20 years—with a little help from a European directive that I was closely involved in—since UK mothers finally began to see an upward trend in their maternity rights. We call on the Government to ensure that, 20 years on, new mothers will not see those rights and that maternity pay diminish.

Those of us who received briefings this week from the national charities Maternity Action and the Refugee Council on their recent report When Maternity Doesn’t Matter were disturbed to learn of the impact of the dispersal policies of the UK Border Agency on pregnant refugee and asylum-seeking women. What response are the Government making to this very important report, especially to its recommendation that no pregnant woman should be dispersed in this country after 34 weeks’ gestation, or sooner than six weeks postnatally?

On the subject of respecting women, I recommend last month’s moving speech by Enda Kenny, the Taoiseach of Ireland, on how the Irish Government would have to own up to the wrong that was done to so many hundreds of Irish girls and women put away in the infamous Magdalene laundries in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s. It is a speech well worth reading.

In conclusion, I quote from the recently published history of stoicism, Philosophic Pride by Christopher Brooke. I declare an interest: he is my son-in-law— no mother-in-law jokes, please. He refers to Mary Wollstonecraft, the 18th century feminist, already mentioned by my noble friend Lady Massey of Darwen and the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill of Bengarve. I did not realise this, but Mary Wollstonecraft was favourably oriented to stoicism and she said:

“Would men but generously snap our chains, and be content with rational fellowship instead of slavish obedience, they would find us more observant daughters, more affectionate sisters, more faithful wives, more reasonable mothers—in a word, better citizens. We should then love them with true affection, because we should learn to respect ourselves”.

Some 221 years on, I say amen to that.

Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Bill

Baroness Crawley Excerpts

Wednesday 12th December 2012 Grand Committee

[Baroness Oppenheim-Barnes]

I would like to make clear at this point that I agree with every single word that the noble Lord said. I hope to have similar support from him when the time comes.

[Baroness Crawley]

My Lords, as president of the Trading Standards Institute—excuse my cold—I agree very much with my noble friend Lord Whitty that there is a need at this point for precision when it comes to the role and functions of the CMA and the transfer of functions from the OFT. I especially agree when it comes to the funding of the transfer of those functions. There is a lot of uncertainty around that at present. There is a good will and hope but we need some answers from the Minister at this point about both national and local authority funding—the latter is under unprecedented pressure—to ensure that this devolution process operates as best it can and strengthens rather than weakens the role of the consumer. We must have some answers as far as funding of the transfer of functions from the OFT is concerned.

As my noble friend Lord Whitty said, some of the roles of the OFT will go to the National Trading Standards Board. However, as he said, that does not have a statutory underpinning. As far as I can see, it is a new animal in the process of being created. The Minister would help us all if he gave us some idea of the accountability within the creation of the National Trading Standards Board. There is a great deal of work being done, as noble Lords can imagine, to ensure that consumers will continue to be protected to the highest standard. I have nothing but admiration for the people trying to make that work, as far as both trading standards offices and the National Trading Standards Board are concerned, the latter made up of senior trading standards officers working across borders. However, we need some answers from the Minister on both funding and accountability within the board, and some idea of the way in which the Government believe that there can be a cohesive landscape at the end of this process.

[Lord Borrie]

My Lords, I very much agree with pretty well everything that has just been said by my noble friend Lady Crawley. She is the current president of the Trading Standards Institute, which has done a great deal of good over many years, not only in the individual local authorities which it represents but in getting together on a number of matters. That has reached a kind of culmination in the creation of the National Trading Standards Board, whereby it can get together and discuss matters, particularly a scam or whatever it is in the way of anti-consumer activity that is being indulged in. It gets together and ensures that the stronger of the trading standards offices takes up the cudgel and takes the enforcement action.

One of the most remarkable things about the provisions we are dealing with in the Bill is that we are on Clause 22. We know that Clauses 20 and 21 create the new authority and refer to the amalgamation of the Office of Fair Trading and the Competition Commission. Yet whereas on competition matters the new authority clearly has the powers to deal with anti-competitive activity, the Bill does not deal with the considerable number of powers which the Office of Fair Trading has built up over the years. They are left in limbo. Therefore, there is a great deal of uncertainty, except on the basis of government statements—it is not in the Bill. Only in government statements have we got some idea of who is to do the advocacy for the consumer and who is to do the other matters that my noble friend Lord Whitty has referred to in Amendment 24ZB—consumer education, consumer advice, consumer advocacy and the enforcement of redress.

Violence Against Women

Baroness Crawley Excerpts

Thursday 29th November 2012 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Crawley]

My Lords, I say, “Hear, hear” to the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Liverpool on his commitment to women bishops—and that is from a collapsed Catholic. I also thank the noble Baroness, Lady Jenkin of Kennington, for raising this vital area of concern to all of us.

I welcome the work that the Government have achieved so far in combating violence against women and girls. Their plan of 88 actions has been set out clearly and their work on encouraging prosecutions and on stalking, in which my noble friend Lady Royall played so vital a role, is to be rightly acknowledged. However, I, too, wish to sound a note of caution about the notorious nature of the under-reporting of this area of crime, as many noble Lords have said. That has been acknowledged clearly by the CPS in its most recent report. We still have a long way to go before we can claim that we are having a positive effect on the majority of the lives of vulnerable women and girls in the UK.

The recession has been bad for everyone but it has been a total disaster for vulnerable women and their families. Tensions within households that can lead to violence and breakdown are exacerbated by unemployment, lack of certainty over permanent housing, lack of food, lack of heating, an increase in consumer debt—the list goes on and on.

These are desperate times for many vulnerable women and their children, who need the safety, the calm and the specialist advice of local refuges. Yet that safety from violence is being sought at a time of unprecedented cutbacks in the funding of women’s refuges. The executive director of the Colchester and Tendring Women’s Refuge says in its latest annual report:

“The ever present threat of cuts to statutory funding and the uncertainty around future commissioning of refuge services in Essex, means that we are constantly looking for additional avenues of income”.

She goes on to say:

“Last year, cuts to our Supporting People grant forced us to make difficult staffing decisions, and we are waiting to see what impact the Welfare Reform Bill will have on the Housing Benefit we receive on behalf of our residents, a significant part of our income for front line services”.

What action are the Government taking to ensure that the safeguarding and the survival of the women’s refuge network carries on at local level?

While it is right and proper to acknowledge the work that the Government are undertaking on behalf of vulnerable women, it is also only fair to point out that they did not start with a blank sheet. I am pleased to see my noble and learned friend Lady Scotland in her place. I am reminded of her own tireless work, and the work of the noble Baroness, Lady Stern, in tackling the victimisation of women. Convictions for rape increased by 45% under my noble and learned friend’s watch and I, for one, am proud of the way in which the previous Labour Government put women and children at the heart of their policy-making legislation.

I end by asking the Minister if she would bring the House up to date on those actions set out in the Government’s action plan which have a completion date of December 2012. If time is short, obviously the noble Baroness can do this in writing. I refer to points 10, 11, 14, 15, 17, 45 and 61. She will know what I am talking about. The Government’s work so far on the vital issue of violence against women will be eroded unless local government cutbacks are revised and economic growth is urgently achieved.