Road Safety: Headlight Glare
Andrea Jenkyns Excerpts(6 months, 2 weeks ago)
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The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Transport (Anthony Browne)
It is wonderful to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Vaz. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Cleethorpes (Martin Vickers) on securing this timely and important debate about headlight glare. To cut to the chase: he asked me a question, and the answer is yes—but I had better expand on that a bit. I notice glare as a driver myself, I get a huge amount of correspondence about it from Members and constituents, and I spend a lot of my time as a Minister answering letters about it, so I know that it is a real issue and one on which the Department has done quite a lot of work. I will come to that work in a moment.
A lot of interesting points have been raised in the debate. I will start by saying a couple of words about road safety in general. The UK already has some of the world’s safest roads, as international statistics show, and we take road safety very seriously.
Dame Andrea Jenkyns (Morley and Outwood) (Con)
According to the latest figures in my area of Leeds, there were 1,585 personal injury collisions in the last year. I am sure that people right across the House agree that far too often we contact our local councils’ highways departments, but they will not even look at putting in speed cameras to prevent accidents due to speeding because they want an accident to happen first. Does the Minister agree that we need to look at new ways to prevent accidents and save lives?
Anthony Browne
I agree that we absolutely need to be proactive. I will take away my hon. Friend’s comments and write to her on that point.
The Government have allocated £185.8 million local authorities via the safer roads fund to improve the safety of 99 of the most high-risk A roads. More widely, the Department is supportive of driving generally. We launched the plan for drivers in October last year, setting out 30 measures to help driving and with drivers’ concerns.
Glare from headlamps is a perennial issue—it has been around for a long time—but there is a compromise between providing illumination with sufficient intensity and distance to enable drivers to see and anticipate potential hazards, and the propensity to cause glare for other road users. As my hon. Friend the Member for Cleethorpes recognised, there is a clear balance to be struck. In order to strike the right balance, all vehicle headlights are designed and tested to follow international standards—developed, as my hon. Friend said, under United Nations rules to ensure that they are bright enough to illuminate the road ahead but do not affect the vision of other road users.
The standards define the beam pattern, and include maximum and minimum light intensities: down on the ground, at a higher level and what would be seen at the driver’s level. The colour of the light is also regulated. The rules are neutral on the form of light, so they apply to LED lights as much as to halogen lights or any other form of light. As I mentioned, lots of people are raising concerns about headlight glare, and we are told—I know this too from friends and relatives—that drivers choose not to drive at night because of the effects.
One challenge that the Department has, which my hon. Friend the Member for Cleethorpes referred to, is that police collision statistics do not indicate an increase in accidents caused by headlight glare, although the concern is very real. My hon. Friend mentioned Baroness Hayter; she has written to me with many questions on the subject, which we have been answering. The actual figures are that in 2021, there were 208 accidents where dazzling headlights were cited as a partial cause. That was down from 373 in 2005. We have the statistics for Cleethorpes, which I thought my hon. Friend might be interested in: from 2013 to 2022—so in the last 10 years —there were five accidents where dazzling headlights were cited as one of the causes, which is obviously five too many. That does not mean that the statistics are perfectly accurate. My hon. Friend cited some statistics from the United States; I am not sure about that methodology.
Glare is, however, clearly problematic for drivers for all the reasons that my hon. Friend mentioned. The Department has not been inactive on the issue. Over recent years, it has raised the issue at the United Nations international expert group on vehicle lighting. Following lengthy and significant negotiations, proposals to mend headlamp aiming rules were agreed in April last year, together with requirements for mandatory automatic headlamp levelling, which is a system that automatically corrects the aim of headlamps based on the loading of a vehicle—for example, when passengers are sat on the backseat or there is luggage in the boot.
Some cars have manual headlamp levelling, but very few drivers know to set it, so when somebody sits on the backseat and the car lifts up slightly, they will not dip their headlights further. The point of automatic levelling is to correct that. As my hon. Friend mentioned, the new requirements are expected to take effect only on new vehicle types from September 2027, which is necessary to give vehicle manufacturers time to redesign their products and incorporate those designs into the manufacturing process. Vehicle manufacturing is a long lead-time industry, and it is basically impossible to make instant changes, but once the tougher measures are implemented, they will hopefully help to alleviate the number of cases where road users feel dazzled by vehicle headlamps.
There is still much that we do not know about the underlying causes, which my hon. Friend mentioned. In the Department, we accept that there is an awful lot going on that we do not know about, which is why we have commissioned the research. I accept from the volume of correspondence I receive that concern about headlamp glare is rising, but we do not know why that is. My hon. Friend mentioned that older drivers are more susceptible to dazzle, which is probably true, and the number of older drivers is growing rapidly. The number of people over 70 who are still driving has risen by 50% over the last 10 years. Driving has become easier because of power steering, automatic cars and a whole load of other safety features, and people feel confident to drive later in life even though they might be more prone to dazzling.
As my hon. Friend mentioned, things such as road humps are a cause of dazzling as the car lifts up, and I am guessing that there are a lot more road humps now than there were 10 years ago. Various hon. Members mentioned retrofitting. There are rules on retrofitting: it is illegal to retrofit a lightbulb that is more powerful or a different colour. The question is whether those rules are fully enforced, which is something I want to find out through the research.
We will be commissioning the research shortly, so this debate is very timely because it is exactly now that we are thinking about the scope. My hon. Friend the Member for Cleethorpes made a lot of interesting suggestions about the sort of people who should be consulted and involved, and my officials will be taking on board everything he said. The research will include real-world trials to test the impact of different light technologies under different scenarios, and driver and vehicle characteristics, to fully understand the root causes of driver glare and how significant it is. We welcome input from relevant experts in the area and those taking part in this debate.
Once the research has been completed, the Government will consider the outputs fully and share them within the UK and with international lighting experts, as my hon. Friend requested. Once we have that research, we will look at whether there need to be any other changes to rules and regulations, and we will discuss that at international level. We will do everything we can to reduce the problems of driver glare, and ensure that our roads are safer and that people can continue to drive for as long as it is safe for them to do so. I am personally determined that the only way the people in the constituency of Cleethorpes should be dazzled is by the wit and wisdom of their Member of Parliament.
Question put and agreed to.
Oral Answers to Questions
Andrea Jenkyns Excerpts(4 years, 6 months ago)
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Gareth Johnson (Dartford) (Con)
Andrea Jenkyns (Morley and Outwood) (Con)
The Minister of State, Department for Transport (Chris Heaton-Harris)
We have extended refunds to all ticket types and made claiming refunds easier to ensure that passengers do not lose out financially.
Chris Heaton-Harris
The Government have been talking to train operators throughout this whole process, as my hon. Friend would expect, but we do not have plans to extend season tickets. Season ticket holders are already entitled to request a refund in accordance with the National Rail conditions of travel. Over 100,000 season ticket holders have already claimed refunds totalling £150 million in the current covid travel restriction period.
Andrea Jenkyns [V]
Mr Speaker, you may hear my toddler chuntering away in the background.
It is crucial that people who are doing the right thing and avoiding public transport are not left out of pocket. Will my hon. Friend therefore confirm that passengers in Morley and Outwood who have purchased their advance tickets—as well as those with season tickets, which he has already mentioned—will be able to receive a refund without any charge for any unused travel during the outbreak?
Chris Heaton-Harris
We have worked with the rail industry to temporarily extend refunds to all ticket types. These changes reflect the exceptional circumstances and the Government’s advice to avoid unnecessary travel. Anytime off-peak and super off-peak tickets can be refunded as usual, and since 17 March all admin fees have been waived. Advance tickets purchased before 23 March for travel from that date onwards are eligible for a fee-free refund, whether the train is cancelled or not. Unused carnet tickets can be refunded or extended depending on the train operator, and season tickets, including station car park season tickets, are already refundable, so we have not changed that policy. A £10 admin fee remains for season ticket refunds.
Oral Answers to Questions
Andrea Jenkyns Excerpts(5 years, 9 months ago)
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Mr Speaker
I remind colleagues that questions should be short and should preferably consist of a single sentence.
Andrea Jenkyns (Morley and Outwood) (Con)
The Secretary of State for Transport (Chris Grayling)
A moment ago, I talked about the importance of the Union—the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland—and we also talked about regional air links. I am pleased to announce that I have agreed to extend the current public service obligation on flights from Londonderry to Stansted for a further two years from May. I believe that that will provide a boost for business in Northern Ireland and, rather importantly, allow spectators to attend the 148th open championship at Royal Portrush this summer.
Andrea Jenkyns
The fantastic pupils at Outwood Primary Academy Ledger Lane in my constituency have organised a petition calling for Wakefield Metropolitan District Council to improve road safety and have persuaded 430 parents and teachers to sign it. The signatories want to see a speed indication device, or other speed restrictions, outside the school. What is the Secretary of State doing to improve road safety outside schools?
Chris Grayling
The Government are combining a range of measures including our cycling and walking safety two-year action plan, which addresses that issue specifically. However, I hope that Wakefield Council, which holds the power to install speed indication devices, will look carefully at the petition, and will respond positively to my hon. Friend’s young constituents.
Oral Answers to Questions
Andrea Jenkyns Excerpts(8 years, 8 months ago)
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Mr McLoughlin
I am not sure whether the hon. Gentleman is asking me to comment on his demise at this stage, but I will resist doing so. He may be right to say that when past Governments have raised this issue, it has been a desktop job. It is not a desktop job; it is a proper, serious piece of work. Importantly, such infrastructure would not be just for 30 years; it will be around for the next 100 years and very important to the area, and it would therefore probably see the demise of both of us.
Andrea Jenkyns (Morley and Outwood) (Con)
T9. The Government are making a welcome investment in rail in the north, with electrification bringing huge benefits to constituencies such as mine. What will the Government do to upgrade stations such as Morley, where improvements to disabled access and other facilities are long overdue? Will the Minister meet me to discuss improvements at Morley station?
Claire Perry
My hon. Friend is right to mention Morley station. It has been put forward several times, but there were many others ahead of it in the queue in terms of passenger footfall—again, we are trying to catch up from decades of neglect. It would be a pleasure to meet her and discuss station refurbishment, in particular disability access.