Victims of Road Traffic Offences: Criminal Justice System

Jane Stevenson Excerpts

Tuesday 30th January 2024 Westminster Hall

[Jane Stevenson (Wolverhampton North East) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to speak under your chairmanship, Ms Nokes. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for North Devon (Selaine Saxby) on introducing such an important debate, on an issue many colleagues are concerned about.

Urban speeding in Wolverhampton is, to my mind, getting worse. That could be just my personal experience driving round local roads, but I am regularly overtaken by other drivers on residential roads with a speed limit of 30 miles per hour. I have taken taxi journeys from the station to my home, but I cannot remember an occasion when I did not have to say to the driver that it was a 30 mph zone.

I strongly feel that we need to do more than intervene to prevent urban speeding only when there is a fatality. In many cases, people will slow down only if they fear they may be caught and fined. StreetWatch teams have been going out with speed guns, and I have urged West Midlands police to look at having more mobile speed cameras in vans. We need measures that create the perception that drivers may be caught and fined, because that can reduce urban speeding. Taxi drivers have trackers in their cars, and licensing committees could clearly be doing spot checks on taxi drivers to ensure that their journey time correlates with the speed limit. All those measures could help reduce urban speeding, which is a huge issue.

Moving on to serious accidents, City of Wolverhampton Council will look at traffic calming and speed reduction measures only where there has been a serious injury or fatality. Because time is brief, I will focus my remarks on one tragic case we had in Wolverhampton. In 2018, Mandy Gayle’s father, Hopton Gayle, was run over and killed on the Stafford Road, which is one of the main arterial routes into Wolverhampton. It has a 40 mph limit, but it is estimated that the man who hit Hopton was travelling at well over 60 mph. He had slowed down to avoid getting caught by a traffic camera, and he was speeding up again when he hit Mandy’s father and killed him. The case is made more horrific by several factors, including the fact that the driver only stopped to push the bonnet of his car back down before driving away, leaving Hopton Gale lying on the Stafford Road.

Mandy lives on that road, and when she left her home, she saw her father under a blanket on the road. These accidents have effects. Mandy has now moved house, and she is campaigning with RoadPeace West Midlands. I again thank my hon. Friend the Member for North Devon, because what happened to Mandy’s father is a case study in the report from the APPG for cycling and walking. In the report, Mandy comments that she does not go a day without thinking of her father, and the consequence for her is a lifelong sentence. The driver, who left the scene, did hand himself in many hours later, and he was sentenced to three years and nine months and banned from driving for only four years. When someone has driven so recklessly and killed a much loved great-grandfather, that does not seem a sufficient sentence.

Most constituents send us to this place to try to pass laws and to ensure that common sense shines through when people receive sentences. When life goes wrong, constituents want our support and they want justice for their families and loved ones. The work of RoadPeace and its “Remain & Report” campaign are therefore important, and I am interested to hear the Minister’s comments on making leaving the scene of an accident a significant factor in the length of sentences—sorry, collisions, not accidents; I will remember to use the new terminology. For the sake of all our constituents, we need to reduce urban speeding, and it would be appreciated if we could hear what the Government’s plan is to help with that and to punish those drivers who endanger us all every day.