Road Safety Strategy

Lord Trefgarne Excerpts

Monday 18th December 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Roborough (Con)]

My Lords, priorities change. Road safety is not just about strategy documents—it is about making continuing improvements. Our recent 2022 statistics show a 2% reduction in fatalities compared with 2019, with traffic levels returning to pre-pandemic levels. This is why the Government are proud of ranking Britain fifth out of 38 countries with available data for the lowest number of road fatalities per million population.

[Lord Trefgarne (Con)]

My Lords, is not it the case that the poor standard of road safety in some of our areas is caused by the large number of potholes in the roads, which need to be fixed and are very numerous? What can be done?

[Lord Roborough (Con)]

We are investing more than £5 billion from 2020-21 to 2024-25 to maintain local roads, with an extra £200 million announced in the Budget in March 2023. This funding is enabling councils up and down the country to fill millions of potholes, repair dozens of bridges and resurface roads. In Network North, we announced £8.3 billion of new funding to fix the blight of potholes over a 10-year period, using funding released from HS2.