Road Traffic Accidents: Hand-held Mobile Devices

Lord Campbell-Savours Excerpts

Thursday 15th December 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Campbell-Savours (Lab)]

My Lords, the House is indebted to the noble Baroness, Lady Pidding, for raising this hugely important issue. I have a particular interest in this debate because I was involved in an accident where the other party was using a mobile phone. After that incident, the other party immediately accepted liability, offered to pay for repairs to the vehicle I was driving and the matter was closed. The police were not involved, nor were insurance companies, but I was left wondering what would have happened in the event that the accident had injured passengers in the vehicle. That set me down the route of considering what options we have open to us.

I think this debate is an interesting indicator of how Parliament gets its priorities distorted. We spend endless hours talking about drink-driving, smoking, parking problems, drug use and whiplash but very little time talking about this issue, which is the subject of much public discussion. We know that almost the entire population under the age of 60 has a mobile phone. I suspect that there are probably more mobile phone users today than there are drinkers, smokers or even drug users.

This debate is about abuse. If you stand on a street corner almost anywhere in the United Kingdom and observe drivers passing by to find out whether they are using their mobile phone, you will be astonished at the numbers who are. Recently, I was standing on a corner waiting for some lights to change near Maidenhead. In the phasing of the lights, discounting one or two of the first vehicles that went through, out of 37 drivers that passed me, 11 were using mobile phones. I believe that what I saw is an indicator of a national problem where the estimates are gross underestimates.

Furthermore, we just do not know how many accidents are caused by mobile phones. The noble Baroness produced some statistics, but I suspect that they are an underestimate. I am not altogether convinced that the police do sufficient investigative work when accidents take place to establish whether the cause of an accident was a mobile phone. Do they stop a driver immediately and say, “Have you been using a mobile phone? Can we have your mobile phone? Can we check whether your mobile phone has been in use?”. I suspect that if rapid checks took place we would find that mobile phones were involved in far more accidents.

Last week, I referred to Google as a source of information on these matters. The benefit of Google is that it provides us with some insight into developments internationally into the issue of mobile phone abuse. Much of that debate is going on in the United States of America. The noble Baroness referred to research in America. The International Journal of Enterprise Network Management recently published a paper on illegal mobile phone usage detection. The trigger for the paper was a series of studies reporting that 20% of all fatal accidents involving trucks or heavy vehicles in the United States involved the use of hand-held mobile phones at the wheel. Additionally, the National Safety Council, another American organisation, published statistics claiming that 21% of all crashes involved people talking on hand-held mobile phones and a further 3% involved texting. I suspect that the statistics here in the United Kingdom would be very similar, if the truth were known. The truth is that we have no reliable data at the moment on the incidence of hand-held mobile phone usage in road accidents in the United Kingdom. This raises a simple question for me: how often do police officers investigate the use of phones in accidents?

When this issue was raised last week in the House, the Minister said:

“Others in the car may well be using a mobile phone quite legitimately … if the driver is not using a mobile phone but others are, that can be a lifeline … during a trip”.—[Official Report, 5/12/2016; col. 493.]

This issue of passengers, to which the noble Baroness referred, led me to do some further research. I trawled some American sites and found that engineers from Anna University in Chennai, India, have invented a device that uses radio frequency identification technology to determine whether a car is moving and the driver using a phone. If a driver is using a phone, the device uses a mobile jammer to shut down the driver’s phone—that is just the driver’s phone. The technology allows passengers complete access to their phones, leaving them free to make calls. Will the Minister follow up on that piece of research?

We come to texting. There is a whole variety of jammer products available for in-vehicle use to deal with texting. A company in America called Access 2 Communications Incorporated has designed a piece of equipment called TextBuster. It is a small piece of hardware which is located under the dashboard—as the noble Baroness referred to—and it thwarts texting. Furthermore, it can shut down phone data connection entirely, shutting off email and other internet connectivity. I can even report that, in America, there are DIY jammer kits on the market, available for as little as £25. That equipment has the benefit of a limited effective range of as little as two or three feet, thereby ensuring that it does not interfere with equipment in neighbouring vehicles. Britain’s retailers might consider the distribution of such equipment, although I understand that at the moment it would be in breach of the 2006 legislation, which I am sure the Minister will refer to in winding up.

The existence of these sorts of technology begs a simple question. Can we imagine circumstances in which automobile manufacturers could offer to integrate these technologies, just like seatbelts or airbags, within vehicles’ Bluetooth systems? Why not make the fitting of such equipment mandatory? That will save lives just as airbags, seat belts and even speed limits do.

Finally, I want to move to another matter, unrelated to mobile phone use but where similar technology issues arise. Jammers can have wider applications and I understand that equipment is now available for interrupting the most frequently used drone frequencies. Drones have become a public nuisance and threaten airline safety, but drone-jamming equipment is now available for operating distances of up to 2,000 feet. The equipment totally disables a drone and will bring it down to earth. Surely we should consider such equipment. I suspect that drone enthusiasts, who pay anything between £30 and £500 in the UK for a drone, would think twice about deploying them in areas where jammers are located if they thought they were vulnerable to destruction—I have airports in mind. Again, Ministers might turn their attention to the possibility of introducing such equipment.

Returning to mobile phones, in my view we need a statutory framework capable of shutting down hand-held mobile phone usage by vehicle drivers when vehicles are mobile. Drivers should be able to use hand-held equipment only when vehicles are stationary, at which time connectivity would be automatically restored. The equipment should be wired into the electrics in a way which prevents tampering by the vehicle’s owner. Commercial vehicles, in particular lorries and vans, should be first in line for the mandatory installation of such equipment. Finally, we should amend the Wireless Telegraphy Act 2006, in particular where its provisions deal with signal interception.

I understand that the Government have acknowledged that enforcement alone would not fully address behaviour. They have said that they are,

“willing to work with industry on technology that would encourage better and safer behaviour”.

The Government say that they want,

“to take full advantage rapidly developing in-car technology and where it can support safe driving behaviour. However … even with technology such as drive-safe modes it is ultimately the driver that has to take responsibility for their actions”.

My case is that, while hand-held equipment is available which can be used in cars, drivers will very often not take responsibility for their actions. You can have all the campaigns in the world, but I suspect that drivers will ignore them. Campaigning in this area is insufficient; we need mandatory provisions and intervention. That is the only way that we are going to save lives.