National Accident Prevention Strategy

Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb Excerpts

Thursday 17th July 2025 Grand Committee

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

I congratulate the noble Baroness on bringing forward this debate. It really is about time, because this issue comes in, goes out again and somehow is never really fixed or sorted. I declare an interest as the president of the Road Danger Reduction Forum.

The one problem I have with the accident prevention strategy—I apologise to the RoSPA team, its president and its vice-president—is that we should never use the word “accident”, because accidents very rarely happen. There is almost always a cause. It is a problem with roads, vehicles or drivers. Survivors who have suffered road traffic crashes or collisions find it very difficult to stomach the fact that they are called accidents. An accident is something where you say, “Oops, I’m so sorry that happened. I didn’t mean it”. Actually, often these incidents are utterly preventable, so when we are talking about traffic, collisions and injuries, which are incredibly serious and a blight on society, we should really not be saying that they are unavoidable, which is almost what “accident” suggests.

I have been working on this issue for 25 years. When I was in the London Assembly, when Ken Livingstone was mayor, we worked very hard to reduce the number of deaths and injuries on London’s roads. By and large, we did a very good job. It is about joined-up thinking. As the noble Baroness said, this has to cut through all departments and be a common language, so that it is possible to make progress.

I got the Met Police to stop using the word “accident”. Now the Met and some other police forces do not talk about “road traffic accidents”, as they used to, but “road traffic collisions”, RTCs. This is a direct result of the work we did in London on road deaths and injuries. I often say “crash”. I was a victim of two crashes as a cyclist. The first time, on a zebra crossing, I got knocked off my bike across the middle of the road, past all the signs, and landed on my wrist. I still have a very impressive scar from that. The second time, less than a year later, I got knocked off by a cyclist and got only a black eye, so that was good. I went on “Newsnight” that night, and they had to put huge amounts of make-up on my face and film me only from one side.

When looking at these collisions, deaths and injuries, we have to look at multiple things. It can be the design of the roads or a lack of police enforcement, which comes and goes. When I was working on this in the London Assembly, we made sure that the road traffic element of the Met Police was very active and supported. Every year, people talked about cutting its budget, but we managed to stop those cuts. Crashes can also be the result of badly maintained HGVs, a lack of segregated and safe cycle paths, drugs, drink or inattention. All these things are factors, and we have to be clear that you have to tackle them in different ways and with a joined-up approach.

I was the Mayor of London’s road safety ambassador for seven years. It was a bit of a joke title at first; Ken gave it to me because he thought that I would not do much with it, I think, but actually we were very successful. In those seven years, we saw a big decline in the number of injuries and casualties on our roads. Some of that was due to the introduction of 20 mph zones, which had quite a big impact in terms of traffic calming and people being aware of the fact that cars really ought to drive more slowly and more carefully—this happened across London—and some of it was due to the extra resources for the traffic police, which was a very important component of driving down deaths and injuries.

My point is that it took political will but also money and, to some extent, research to understand how these things happen. The car lobby often did not like the things that we did, but the fact is that it worked, and people could see that it worked. The 20 mph zones became fairly well accepted in London, and segregated cycle lanes worked and made people a lot happier. The measures reduced the number of people who were killed or injured, obviously, but they also reduced the number of grieving family members and partners who had to face the fact that their loved ones were dead and gone or might never be the same again—that is, they might never walk or speak again. As the noble Baroness, Lady Crawley, said earlier, they also reduced the costs to the NHS and the care system of looking after thousands of people with life-changing injuries; on a national scale, that is absolutely huge. So, having an accident prevention strategy is worth while, but only if departments are willing both to put resources and safeguards in place, in order to make things happen, and to work together; that is a really important part of it.

On health inequalities, the poorer you are, the more likely you are to live next to a large, dirty road such as the M25, which, of course, gives you not just a huge amount of traffic and air pollution but danger.

The Labour Government are right to keep repeating that prevention is better than cure, but I am not sure that they recognise just how much that involves challenging vested interests. I know that this is not easy, whether it is the car lobby whingeing about the police doing something on our lawless roads; the development industry taking shortcuts with the regulations around fire safety; or people drinking or taking drugs and then driving, thinking that the police have better things to do. For me, it is hard to think of anything better that you can do with your time—particularly for politicians—than prevent deaths and injuries. The well-being of the people has to be our first job. So I hope that Ministers will adopt this call for a crash prevention strategy, but I also hope that they will learn the big lesson from Grenfell Tower and our lawless roads: you have to face down vested interests in order to save lives and progress this agenda.

I very much support the asks from the noble Baroness, Lady Crawley, for a named Minister and to co-ordinate the national data. In the NHS 10-year plan, where do road crash victims come in? I do not know much about the Get Britain Working reforms; they sound okay. Of course, education from primary school onwards is absolutely crucial. I would be happy to be the Minister named to do this job for the Government, because I am very well qualified and I am sure that I could get on with the whole Labour Government.