Road Traffic Accidents: Hand-held Mobile Devices

Lord Woolf Excerpts

Thursday 15th December 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Woolf (CB)]

My Lords, I am pleased to say a few words on this issue. I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Pidding, on raising the matter and on the research that she has obviously done. So far as research goes, I also congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, on his efforts in that regard. I hope that what they have contributed will be noted by the Minister and, in due course, taken forward in so far as that is practical.

I wish to raise only one specific interest in this matter. One can have immense sympathy for victims of crime, particularly when motoring offences occur as they are engaged in an outing or merely crossing the road, and there is a situation where loved ones are killed. I can see that they would expect the punishment that is, in their eyes, appropriate to what has occurred to them. However, I suggest that that is not the way to deal with what is evidently a problem. There are limits to our ability to use heavier and heavier sentences—sentences which are continually rising—to deal with everyday life problems. Such problems are much better dealt with by campaigns to bring home to the public what is really at stake in what they may see as innocent actions.

I go back far enough in the law to remember when—I was a young man and had the task of defending people charged with driving under the influence—it was necessary for a driver to go into the police station and walk along a painted white line. If the driver managed to walk along the white line, it was thought that they had not committed the offence of driving under the influence. It was great sport for young advocates, such as myself at that stage, to take advantage in court of the inevitable stupidity of what was happening and of knowing that the juries before whom the cases came would often think, “There but for the grace of God go I”, and therefore had considerable reluctance to convict. We certainly do not want to repeat the mistakes of that time in dealing with this contemporary problem.

We need an education campaign that makes it absolutely clear that driving with a mobile in your hand and speaking into it is extremely ill advised if you want to avoid driving dangerously. We do not want to create specific offences of a different sort. The existing offences are totally adequate to deal with those who drive dangerously and the penalties in those offences are sufficient to act as a deterrent.

In my experience, the sad thing about motoring offences is that, even though they have the most tragic consequences, the people who commit them are usually perfectly decent people who are horrified by what they have done and continue to carry the scars of what they have done for the rest of their lives. That they do so does not act as a comfort to victims of the offences, but it is not a situation where they need to do other than learn the dangers involved in what they are doing.

I urge the Government to do two things. The first is to bring home to the public in an appropriate way the dangers involved, and the second is to increase detection. That was mentioned by the noble Baroness, and I am sure there would not be the number of occasions detected by the survey that the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, carried out if it was given greater importance in the agenda of tasks to be performed by the police. It may well be that there are all sorts of ways in which their task can be made easier, just as in the case of drink-driving it was possible to devise methods of testing how much alcohol there was in a driver’s blood. It could be the same with mobile phones. If they can be jammed as easily as the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours thinks, perhaps that could be looked into as well. But please do not create more offences and please do not rely on imprisonment to improve the situation.

We have a problem in our prisons today, which is very much related to the number of persons serving sentences at this time. It is almost now at a crisis stage. At the same time, by unwise legislation, we have increased sentencing penalties continuously. It is sometimes said, “Oh, of course it’s the courts who impose the sentences”, and when it is proposed to increase a particular sentence, it is said, “We can leave it to the courts to sentence at the right level”. But if you increase the statutory penalty to life imprisonment, as is proposed in the case of killers driving dangerously, for example in the Government’s press release, “Killer drivers to face life sentences”, you are interfering with the whole pattern of sentencing, which we have devised so that there is a relationship between sentences.

When you look at the pattern of sentencing, you can look at the top and the bottom. At the bottom, no question of imprisonment arises, because the offence will not be punishable in that way; at the top, life sentences are the appropriate sentence for murder. It is the heaviest sentence now available to us. If you do not want the sentences in between to be raised higher across the board, you must be very careful to limit those situations where a life sentence can be imposed. Otherwise, Parliament is giving a message to the judiciary, which it is bound to observe, that the level of sentences expected for this type of offence is life imprisonment. Even in cases of death by dangerous driving, which is of course the equivalent of what we are looking at but with mobile phones involved, at present the maximum sentence, very appropriately, is 14 years. I would have said that is on the high side for the great majority of offences, and you certainly must not extend the embrace of the heaviest sentences to situations other those for which they are strictly appropriate. Otherwise, you are creating something disproportionate.

Mobile Phone Use: Motorists

Lord Woolf Excerpts

Monday 5th December 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon]

The right reverend Prelate raises an issue about the manufacture of motor cars. The Government are not talking specifically on this issue. Hands-free mobile phone use is very difficult to regulate and enforce, and there are often other distractions in a car, such as loud music. I am the father of three children, and if I have all three of them in the back seat at the same time, that is quite a distraction. On a more serious point, we are looking to ensure that we inform the public, and campaigns such as THINK! will stress the importance of not using handheld mobile phones when driving.

[Lord Woolf (CB)]

I am very pleased to hear the Minister adopting such a carefully reasoned approach in his responses so far. May I suggest to him that the reason that he must do that is that increasing sentences excessively, even though they are discretionary, leads to sentencing inflation? With the situation in our prisons today, we cannot afford to have further sentencing inflation. Additionally, juries will not convict if they think that sentences are inappropriate. As the Minister has already accepted, the real thing is to change the culture, as happened with drink-driving.