Road Traffic Accidents: Hand-held Mobile Devices

Lord Hunt of Chesterton Excerpts

Thursday 15th December 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hunt of Chesterton (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Pidding, for tabling this important Motion. I support most, though perhaps not all, of the proposals that she brought forward. Some of us remember that when drink-driving and seat-belt laws were introduced in the 1960s there were many objections from drivers, but of course we soon saw that many lives were saved.

We cannot be complacent when new proposals for safety are made. I have had several colleagues and friends killed in car accidents. I myself was nearly killed when hitchhiking in a once and once-only trip in a 100 miles-an-hour Jaguar, which nearly hit a tractor. Today we are reading about another cause of deaths: people using mobile phones at the time of the accident. How can we make drivers aware of the dangers and reform their behaviour?

Last year, I was driving through a small town in Somerset at about 35 miles an hour—which, I fear, was above the limit—and there was a speed camera. The police then sent me a letter inviting me to attend a morning’s training course to learn about the danger of speeding. I was impressed, as we saw excellent videos of accidents and how to improve one’s driving. It was instructive—for example, we learned that driving on country roads is particularly dangerous—but we were not informed about the dangers of driving while using a mobile phone or being distracted by infotainment systems.

I urge the Minister to ensure that these courses should include video and instruction about the accidents associated with drivers. Yesterday, I asked the Library whether there was any instruction in the Highway Code about the use of mobile phones. To my surprise, it was only in the most recent edition of 2016, where there is a reference in paragraphs 149 and 150, which are labelled,

“Mobile phones and in-vehicle technology”.

The warning is not strongly expressed, and no information is provided about penalties for driving when using mobile phones. Will the Minister consider strengthening those clauses and providing diagrams to show how drivers lose concentration when using mobile phones? Will the Minister also ensure that questions about mobile phones are asked by examiners during the driving test?

The House of Lords Committee on Science and Technology, of which I am a member, is currently considering, among other things, people’s behaviour in road vehicles and noticing how it will change as vehicles become partially or wholly self-driving or, as it is said, autonomous. It seems likely that there will be an even greater tendency for drivers to relax their attention not only when the vehicle has a semi-autonomous aspect but if they are using mobile phones or infotainment. This is a complex interaction which our committee has not considered, but perhaps we should.

In fact, it is not too fanciful to consider how people’s reactions, both physical and psychological, to the movement of the car may be affected by the input from the phone or media system. How will these complex interactions be incorporated in the new semi-autonomous vehicles emerging from the German car industry, which seems to be well down the track with new systems in which your car will autonomously react to the cars in front of it, and so on? If that will also take into account the use of the mobile phone by people in front of you and the people in front of them, it becomes even more complex. The Government need to work very closely with the auto industry to analyse and control these extraordinary new developments.

I have two final points. First, why not insist that mobile phones should not sit, as the noble Baroness, Lady Pidding, suggested, nicely and conveniently on the dashboard? I suggest that, if you insist on using a mobile phone, you have a very big, nasty yellow thing sitting on your dashboard, so that everyone in the street knows you are using it. That is the trouble at the moment—you can hide using your mobile phone and no one knows you are doing it. We want to make what people are doing visible to their neighbours. I suggest that mobile phone should be uncomfortable, large, luminous, and seen to be anti-social. That is a new idea, and perhaps not so acceptable on the Benches opposite.

Secondly, the Highway Code in both paragraphs recommends rather strongly that if you want to use your mobile phone or laptop, you should go to a lay-by. That proposal seems sensible, but it will be used only if the Highways Agency greatly improves lay-bys, many of which are not safe and are often quite disgusting.