Road Safety

David Drew Excerpts

Tuesday 16th October 2018 Westminster Hall

[Dr David Drew (Stroud) (Lab/Co-op)]

I am delighted to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Moon, and I congratulate the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent South (Jack Brereton) on securing this very worthwhile debate. My contribution will be very short and will cover slightly different areas to those covered so far.

I am indebted to many of my parish councils. I attended a meeting last Friday at St Paul’s church in Whiteshill and over two thirds of my parish councils were represented there. The issue that people came to discuss was speeding. It is probably the biggest issue I have, in terms of postbag, outside of all the individual issues that we all face as Members of Parliament.

People came to that meeting to express their concerns, but I was also greatly indebted to my friend Charles Pedrick, who has done more than anyone I know in the area to highlight the issue of what to do about speeding. He organised the meeting, with the support of Martin Surl, Gloucestershire’s police and crime commissioner, who has put his money where his mouth is by partly paying for two automatic number plate recognition cameras—one in Whiteshill, which is why we were there, and the other one in Rodborough. The cameras have demonstrated that, in the main, people are law-abiding, but those who break the law do so in a hideous way, by driving at 70 mph through a 30 mph zone.

My first question to the Minister—this is why I will be brief—is whether it is possible that we could use the data that has been collected. In Gloucestershire, about 100,000 pieces of data have been collected in the year or so since the two ANPR cameras have been up. At the moment, that data is used by the police. They go and knock on a door, in extremis, or they send letters to those who have offended seriously, not once or twice but on a regular basis. Is it possible that we could use that data more proactively, so that we can catch these people out?

I was genuinely shocked when I tabled a parliamentary question about how many people in Gloucestershire were banned from driving. Given how serious speeding and drink-driving are, the number is infinitesimally small, and that is because we do not seem to have any joined-up action. Can we use that information to crack down on those people who are making other people’s lives a misery?

Of course, it is not only people who are affected by speeding but cows and horses. There are a number of commons in my constituency. Every year, when the cows are put out we lose about 12 of them, because they are knocked down. However, it is not just a case of knocking down an animal; such incidents have a hideous impact on the affected farmers, who have to pick up the beast and who also often lose out financially. There is very little that can be done about the perpetrators. We ought to be able to do much more to them. If anyone hits an animal in a car, it is their own fault; they were driving without due care and attention. Is there something more that we can do to follow up on those individuals who have had accidents and caused all this disruption?

The same is true of horses. We are considering how we can have safer bridleways, but how do people get to those safer bridleways? We need to consider, very carefully, how the network can be joined up, to ensure that people are able to ride their horses safely, without people rushing past them at 60 mph.

My last point comes from the meeting I attended last week and it is a request to look at traffic regulation orders. Can we have a way in which we can make villages more composite, so that each village does not have to pay quite a large sum of money to get a TRO to reduce the speed in their area to 20 mph, which is largely recognised as being what villages need?

If the Minister could answer those questions in the short time that he has today, I would be very grateful.