UN Sustainable Development Goal 3

Baroness Randerson Excerpts

Thursday 19th March 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Randerson (LD)]

My Lords, I start by congratulating the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, on his speech. I welcome the fact that reducing road traffic casualties is enshrined in the United Nations sustainable development goals and targets, but it is disappointing that so little progress has been made. Globally, road traffic crashes are the eighth leading cause of death for people of all ages, and they are the leading cause of death for children and young adults. Approximately 1.35 million people are killed on the world’s roads each year, while roughly 50 million people are injured. Some 90% of these accidents occur in low and middle-income countries, even though those countries are home to only 54% of the world’s vehicles. The average cost of all this is 3% of GDP. At a time when we are becoming all too familiar with pandemic death rates, road accidents are indeed the neglected pandemic.

Some of the poorest countries are home to the worst statistics. Anyone who visits many African countries, for instance, cannot fail to be shocked by the intensity of the traffic and the lack of basic safety measures. These countries also lack robust health services or systems of support for those unable to work, which simply magnifies the impact on families where one member is injured in a traffic accident.

There are some international initiatives to help these countries improve their road safety, but as yet they have made little headway. The UK recently participated in the third Global Ministerial Conference on Road Safety and new targets were agreed. The World Bank hosts the Global Road Safety Facility, and the UK has committed £9.8 million between 2013 and 2021. I would be grateful if the Minister could tell us whether the Government have committed funding for any other international schemes. Although I welcome the £9.8 million, it is a paltry sum.

All these statistics ignore the other unseen killer that is a product of our road transport, and that is emissions—both carbon dioxide, which creates climate change, and nitrogen dioxide, which contributes to more than one in 19 deaths in our largest cities and towns here in the UK. If it is bad here, it is even worse in poorer countries, where the vehicles are often older and therefore more polluting and large numbers of people live in close proximity to busy roads.

This debate refers specifically to our own progress here in the UK in reducing death rates on our roads. I am pretty sure that, when the Minister responds, he will refer to our relatively safe roads. Our road accident statistics—1,784 in 2018—compare well with many other countries’, yet progress on reducing the number of fatalities has stalled.

For the rest of my time today, I will simply pick on a number of separate but clear issues that lie behind those figures and can be quite easily addressed. We have seen a major increase in traffic in the UK in recent years. We have also seen significant advances in vehicle technology, which should make them safer, yet in many respects our approach to road safety has not kept pace with modern facilities or challenges.

Pedestrians, cyclists and motorcyclists have significantly higher casualty rates per mile travelled than those travelling in cars or buses. I commend to the Minister research undertaken at Nottingham University, which has highlighted that one of the most common forms of fatal crash is when a car pulls out in front of an oncoming bike or motorbike. They are called LBFTSs—looked but failed to see. The evidence is that when a lot of traffic is on the road, drivers often fail to remember all they have seen and simply forget bikes and motorbikes most easily. All this suggests the need for a road safety campaign to encourage drivers to reinforce their visual memory by literally thinking bike and saying “Bike”. We all remember from our childhood the “Look right, look left, look right again” and “Stop, look, listen” campaigns. Those things are simple but memorable and lifetime effective.

The group of car drivers most likely to have a fatal accident are the newest and youngest. Those aged 17 to 24 make up only 7% of full licence holders but equate to 16% of road deaths, even though on average their mileage is lower. Some 15% of the deaths of young people occur in road traffic collisions. In 2017, 313 people were killed in crashes involving young drivers; 108 of them were the drivers themselves, 55 were their passengers and 150 were other road users.

Other than introducing the theory paper, the driving test today still looks remarkably like the one I took when I was 17. I suggest that that is ridiculous. For a number of years there have been calls for a graduated driving licence. One in five new drivers crashes their car in the first year. There are a number of limitations that could be placed on new drivers so that they can gradually build up to full permission to drive at any time of day on all roads and with passengers. I was pleased to see that the Government committed to considering this last year, and I hope that the Minister can update us today. Wherever GDLs have been introduced, from California to New Zealand, death and accident rates have fallen.

However, those of us who are older can also cause problems. The World Health Organization says that poor eyesight is a key risk factor in road crashes, and approximately 3,000 casualties a year in the UK can be attributed to the driver having poor vision. The noble Lord, Lord Low, addressed this issue in considerable detail, and I congratulate him on his speech. I reiterate that the problem is that there is no structured approach to testing for adequate vision. People can lose up to 40% of their vision without even being aware that they are losing it. Although there are minimum eyesight standards, the responsibility lies with us as drivers. Once you have your licence, you are unlikely to be tested again for a very long time, if ever. Doctors and police can of course intervene and report you, but the process is pretty haphazard. We all know that eyesight declines with age, and a requirement for a simple and regular test is surely a fairly modest one.

On seat belts, there have been increasingly precise requirements since the 1970s, so you would think that the case has been made. Yet the statistics show that passengers, as opposed to drivers, are particularly cavalier about this. In 2017, 27% of car occupant fatalities were of people not wearing their seat belt. That statistic should be advertised a lot more frequently. I am pleased to see that the Government are considering imposing penalty points on those who flout the law on this. There is a steady stream of prosecutions in our courts—over 6,000 in 2018—and they achieve a high level of convictions. The figures show a stark picture. I would be careful in how I say this but the picture is stark: it is overwhelmingly a male problem. One in 10 of those prosecuted is female, and the rest—I lead your Lordships to conclude—are therefore male.

Finally, recent research from the Institute of Advanced Motorists demonstrates the dangers associated with in-car entertainment systems. We are all familiar with the dangers of texting or using our mobile phone while driving—although you can still see people doing it quite commonly—but driver distraction is still a factor in about one-third of road collisions in Europe. The IAM research showed that drivers interacting with in-car systems such as Android Auto and Apple CarPlay increase their stopping distance by four to five car lengths. That is a considerable increase. I say to the Minister that we investigate air and rail accidents and have bodies to do that and to draw strategic conclusions on safety. I suggest to the Minister that we need a body to look at road accidents as well.

History has shown us that, where the law changes, social acceptance rapidly follows—for example, on drink driving—so I encourage the Government to embrace the need for change.