Road Traffic Accident Prevention

Barry Sheerman Excerpts

Tuesday 6th December 2016 Westminster Hall

[Mr Philip Hollobone (in the Chair)]

Will all those who are inexplicably not staying for the next debate please leave quickly and quietly, because we now have an hour-long debate on the very important subject of road traffic accident prevention?

[Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered road traffic accident prevention.

It is a pleasure to introduce my debate under your chairmanship, Mr Hollobone. We are long-term colleagues and often compete for Mr Speaker’s eye, but always on a very good and familiar basis, so I am looking forward to this debate.

Some hon. Members will know that road traffic accident prevention is a long-term interest of mine. As a very young man, a very long time ago, I came into the House after having seen the deaths of two young people who were thrown from their car and who died by the side of the road. That image never left me or my imagination—it haunted me—and when I got into the House, we had tried 13 times to introduce compulsory seatbelts, and 13 times that had been defeated. On an all-party basis, a number of us organised and formed a group to campaign. As you might know, Mr Hollobone, the 14th time, the night before a royal wedding, we kept our troops here on an amendment tabled by Lord Nugent of Guildford, a Conservative peer. It bounced back to the House of Commons. We kept our troops here and the others did not. Remember that in those days Mrs Thatcher, Michael Foot and both Chief Whips were against seatbelts. We held our nerve, kept our troops here and, by a majority of 72, seatbelt legislation was introduced. How many lives have we saved since then? It was a really good fight and victory.

These days, we could all be in a nice cosy bubble, thinking, “Isn’t it wonderful? The UK, the British, are leading on road safety. We are an exemplar to the rest of the world. We sometimes vie a little bit with Sweden, but we are pretty darn good.” Well, I have to tell you, Mr Hollobone, that 1,730 people died on British roads last year. For 1,730 families, there was a knock on the door to tell them that their loved one was dead. And these are preventable accidents. This is not like a disease; it is not like getting something ghastly and wasting away. This is something that happens for all sorts of reasons, but it means that those families are devastated. If I may say a little on the financial side, it of course costs the country a great deal. Every road death costs an enormous amount of money, and that is in addition to the human tragedy.

When we organised the seatbelt legislation, a group of MPs set up something called the Parliamentary Advisory Council for Transport Safety. Today, most people call it PACTS, and it has become one of the most influential transport safety groups in the world. We are an exemplar to many Parliaments throughout the world, and we spend a lot of time persuading other Parliaments to follow our path.

Also, after 10 years, we got together with a group of the Dutch, Germans, Belgians and Swedes to form the European Transport Safety Council, which has become the most influential group across Europe. We are very proud of that. Sometime afterwards, I had the honour of being asked to form, with the backing of the World Bank, the Global Road Safety Partnership, which operated and still operates right across the world, trying to save—this is a desperate number—the 1.3 million people in the world who die every year on the roads. Yes, some countries have much less regulation than we do. In India and China particularly, the situation is tragic, as it is in South Africa. There are dreadful accidents, deaths and serious injuries in other countries, but today I want to concentrate on the UK.

As I have said, 1,730 people died on our roads last year. I think that we are becoming a little cosy and complacent about that number of deaths. I am not saying that we are becoming too complacent. I am looking at the Minister, who is a good friend of mine. He is a very good Minister, but I will nudge him today in a kindly way. Five people are killed every day in our country. That is five families destroyed. Ahead of today’s debate, I was inundated with emails and tweets, many of which were from bereaved families who had been torn apart by the actions of drunk, drugged or distracted drivers. That is the truth of the matter: the deaths are preventable.

All the time in this Parliament we are trying to get more Members engaged in reducing the casualties on their patch, bringing the figures down home. Every year, PACTS issues to every Member of Parliament—I hope that everyone can pick this up online or through PACTS—a dashboard showing what happens in their constituency, but it does not only show that: it shows how many deaths and how many serious accidents there have been, and we rate the constituency against other similar constituencies. That is a very useful tool. Someone cannot say, “I happen to live in a very dense urban area and the roads are terrible,” or “I live near a motorway.” All that is accounted for, so if someone’s constituency is well above the norm in this regard, they as the Member of Parliament should be out there campaigning with a coalition or partnership.

[Jake Berry (Rossendale and Darwen) (Con)]

On the subject of the dashboard and distracted drivers, has PACTS come to a view on the modern phenomenon of new cars having significant IT and entertainment systems—something a bit like an iPad—incorporated in the dashboard and what effect that innovation has had on the number of accidents?

[Mr Sheerman]

That is a brilliant intervention, because it is in the later part of my speech! It is true that the very sophisticated dashboard that some models of car now have, showing drivers not only how to park—self-parking—but all the hazards and all the different information that they can log into, is becoming an area of great concern, but the reason I have kept to a good, true and relatively sane path in transport safety is that I was converted by some of the best scientists in our universities and in the Transport Research Laboratory and other places to always remember: do not go for hearts and flowers; go for good science, good evidence, and what works in countries such as ours. I have always stuck to that, and it has guided me and my colleagues very well.

Understandably, there is an uprising of feeling when something dreadful happens, and recently we have seen some dreadful things—families being killed, mothers with children being killed, by distracted drivers. We know about that, but we have to bear it in mind that, overall, good science, good evidence, should be the watchword. I look at my friend the hon. Member for Rossendale and Darwen (Jake Berry)—he is a friend on these matters particularly—and I say, “Let’s do the science. Let’s do the evaluation of the level of distraction caused by every innovation, including the new design of car interiors.” I think that that should be ongoing. I have not seen the results of research on that, but I know that it is a worrying area.

In Europe, 26,300 people died last year, and there was a slightly rising curve in our own country. I want now to mention the Twitter involvement in this debate. May I commend it, Mr Hollobone? What a wonderful innovation it is that now, when there is to be a Westminster Hall debate, we can involve the broader public by asking what they think about the debate we are to have on the following day. We had one for an hour yesterday. There was a lot of involvement and there were excellent ideas.

One of the top concerns for people was driver education. There is no doubt that young people are very vulnerable in the early years after they first learn to drive, when there are many accidents. There is evidence of young people not driving in the proper way and of that leading to pretty horrific casualties—the deaths and serious injuries of young people in their teens and early twenties.

My wife knows me extremely well—we have been married a very long time and have four children and 10 grandchildren; I do not know if that is a record among those in the Chamber, but I would not mind putting a bet on it—and always thought I had something of the Italian in my driving style, but I once amazed her by passing the test for the advanced driving certificate. I took the advanced drivers’ course possibly because I thought I was not a very good driver. A lot of evidence shows that good driving behaviour comes from good learning and good education early in a young person’s career. I talked to a chief constable in one of the coastal towns in which we used to have party conferences three or four years ago, and he said, “I am not so worried these days about young people having accidents; I am worried about elderly people who share with younger children a diminishing ability to judge distance and speed, and who drive very badly as they get older. There is no one in the family with the guts to say, ‘Mum, Dad—it’s time you stopped driving.” We therefore need good training at the early age and at the later age, and to ensure that the Government do all that they can so that young people and older people are well educated on this life-and-death issue.

More than 200 tweets yesterday wanted distractions to be given a top priority. One of the largest distractions that people are talking about these days is mobile phones, and I absolutely agree that there should be that level of public interest. Yesterday there was the interest in the issue of drink and drugs, and we have had steady improvement. The Minister knows that I am concerned that there is still not an effective roadside test for alcohol, so that people do not have to take up so much police time by going to the police station for testing, and so on. We have roadside testing for drugs but not for alcohol at the moment. However, there is no doubt that the real priority for the public is the distraction caused by mobile phones.

We see high-profile cases in which people who are distracted by their mobile phones cause dreadful accidents. I do not want to go into all the recent tragic cases, but many in this Chamber will know of the family killed by the lorry driver who was scrolling through songs on his phone. That was a terrible thing to have happened, and I can see why anyone who loses their lovely family, or members of their family, wants the strongest possible sentence available for that sort of behaviour. I have a lot of respect for that view, although it does sometimes lead people to look for a silver-bullet solution for the problems that we face. There is no silver bullet, but there is the evaluation of all accidents backed up by good evidence. Although I have sympathy with the idea of having stiff penalties for people who use their mobile phones or who drink or take drugs and drive, it will not save all those lives. It is more complicated than that.

There is also less public knowledge about the risk of drivers with poor eyesight. Road crashes due to poor driver vision are estimated to cause 2,900 casualties in the UK every year. I am not advertising Vision Express—my glasses are not from Vision Express, by the way—but its interesting survey found that 94% of people are unaware that vision can deteriorate by up to 40% before the driver starts to notice. Leaving drivers to self-report poor eyesight seems to Vision Express—I share this view—not to be a good idea. I certainly noticed as I got older that my vision, especially at dusk and when driving at night, was not as good as it should be. I recommend that we have tighter control on tests of good vision for drivers, certainly as they get older.

[Rebecca Harris (Castle Point) (Con)]

I want to intervene before the hon. Gentleman gives my entire speech. Does he agree that too few people really understand about the loss of eyesight and the fact that they lose their eyesight in the way that they do? We need to do more as a nation to publicise it and get people to recognise it.

[Mr Sheerman]

The hon. Lady is absolutely right. I will not detain the Chamber for long with the rest of my speech, but I add that the UK is one of only five EU countries that does not legally require drivers to be tested by a medical or optical professional as part of their driving test, so she is absolutely right.

Another issue that is becomingly increasingly evident—with this I will upset the Minister—is the lack of police officers making sure that our roads are safe. The number of road traffic officers is down 23% from 2010. I raised this issue on Monday in Home Office questions, which you were there for, Mr Hollobone. The night before, I was coming back from Cambridge, with my wife driving, and on the M11 an enormous rescue van—a lorry—with another lorry on top was proceeding at over 65 mph where there was a 50 mph limit. The size and weight of that in an accident would have killed a lot of people. Road traffic technology is able to detect such drivers. There are those who drive—I said “like maniacs”, but perhaps that was a bit harsh—in a very dangerous fashion with no fear that there will be a flashing blue light and that they will be pulled over, and I have to say there is a relationship between proper policing on the roads and good detection. I go to many conferences on transport safety and have spoken at a number of big conferences this summer. I see wonderful technology there, but that will not replace the police—in cars and on motorbikes—on our roads. That point will probably upset the Minister most; he and I usually get on quite well.

The Government have said that they are serious about making our roads safer, but I will ask the Minister about another thing that will upset him—that is, targets. For some reason, both the coalition and the present Governments believed that targets are not the sort of thing that they should have. They do not like them, and there is a kind of ideological resistance to them. However, all the research across the world—he knows I believe in research—shows that if we do not have targets for road casualty reduction, we do not get the reduction. We have to have a road casualty reduction programme. That is a very important point. I do not know of any leading expert, in or out of the Government, who honestly disagrees with that view. We need targets in order to get a reduction.

I was taken by the people who got involved with us on Twitter yesterday and said that we need to have that wonderful, but perhaps unrealistic, target of zero casualties and zero deaths on our roads. That is visionary and optimistic, but we know that targets work. We all know that we do not get casualty reduction in any country, or any part of a country, without a partnership and a team that have passion and leadership and care about this useless waste of life.

Mr Hollobone, you know that I am passionate about this issue. I know that not enough of our colleagues in the House of Commons are still interested enough in transport safety. It is a bit unfashionable and not sexy enough for some, but it is vital to the people that we represent.

[Mr Andrew Smith (Oxford East) (Lab)]

I thought that my hon. Friend might be perorating towards a conclusion. [Interruption.] No, there is much more to come. I commend him for his passion and all his work over the years on this important subject. Will he say something about cyclists’ safety in particular? I am sure that a number of the tweets he mentioned would have referred to that. Does he agree that we all have an obligation, whether as cyclists or as motorists, to promote cycling safety? He referred to the Netherlands: do we not have a lot to learn from the success of its dedicated provision for cyclists in the interests of safety?

[Mr Sheerman]

My right hon. Friend makes a very fair point. I made a decision that I would not cover everything in this discussion but, yes, increasingly there are vulnerable road users including cyclists and pedestrians, both children and adults. There is also an increasing concern—I am sure the Minister is listening—about the number of really horrid, terrible, tragic accidents involving heavy goods vehicles. All the conferences and presentations I saw this summer mentioned the increasing relationship between horrible accidents in places such as London and HGVs. But, to be honest, I have to say—I am not a London MP, but a Yorkshire one—there has actually been more improvement in road safety standards and casualty reduction in London than in many places outside. We can get carried away by the passion and enthusiasm, but my message is that these are avoidable deaths, and we should use good science, good evidence and practical work done in other places to learn and improve.

[Mr Philip Hollobone (in the Chair)]

The debate finishes at no later than 5.30 pm. The guideline speech limits for the three Front Benchers are five minutes for the Scottish National party, five minutes for Her Majesty’s Opposition and 10 minutes for the Minister. That means that I need to call the Front Benchers no later than seven minutes past 5. It is now nine minutes to 5, which means that we basically have 15 minutes, and there are four people who want to speak. If hon. Members limit themselves voluntarily to four minutes, I will not have to impose a time limit. If you go over four minutes, somebody is not going to be able to speak. Rebecca Harris will show us how she can make all the points she wants to within four minutes.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Sheerman]

Thank you so much, Mr Hollobone, for letting me sum up the debate. I shall say only a few things. I have the greatest respect for the Minister and will continue to nudge him on targets, because the Scots have it right on alcohol. There is a worrying upward trend in women drink-drivers that we should all be aware of.

I want to finish with a bit more passion. The research into transport safety has declined over the years. Internationally, university research is not as strong as it used to be, so we have to be careful about the quality of research available worldwide. Local councils also now have much less money for road safety matters. There are some really great individuals, such as Michael Woodford, who are very interested in road safety, as is the UN now. There is increasing interest in the Inter-Parliamentary Union and Commonwealth Parliamentary Association helping us to educate other parliamentarians about what can be achieved in places like China and India. We should be making the CPA and IPU into something useful. They should not be about just going there and shaking hands and smiling at people—I have been on those trips. Let us make them more positive. We should be corresponding with those parliamentarians and saying, “This is what we’ve done in the UK. Can we help you to do something similar?”

The fact is that if someone does not have a passion for this rather unusual subject, they should not be in Parliament, because it is about our constituents and families. Let us get more people involved in pacts and in the campaign, and let us make sure that Britain is a safer place to ride on horses, on bicycles, on motorcycles and in cars. Most of all, let us make sure it is safer for families enjoying themselves and for those getting to work.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House has considered road traffic accident prevention.