Dangerous Driving

Julie Hilling Excerpts

Monday 27th January 2014 Commons Chamber

[Julie Hilling (Bolton West) (Lab)]

I too congratulate the hon. Member for Kingswood (Chris Skidmore) on securing this important debate. I want to approach the matter in a slightly different way and to talk a little more about what precedes a death caused by dangerous driving. I want to talk about how we do not take driving laws seriously in this country. We still believe that driving is a right and that, often, laws are there to be broken. Consider the attitude of many hon. Members to speed cameras. People talk about them being cash cows, not recognising them as devices to get us to obey the law or that they are often in place because of long campaigns by local residents about the dangers associated with a particular piece of road. We know that excessive speed is a contributory factor to the vast majority of serious accidents.

I want to talk specifically about the number of people legally driving on our roads at this moment in time with more than 12 points on their licence. A person in Liverpool is driving with 47 points on their licence, a woman in Bolton with 27 points on her licence, and 8,000 other people with more than 12 points. What does that say about the seriousness with which we treat driving laws? The law says that people should be banned when they have 12 points, unless they would face exceptional hardship. Exceptional hardship is not about losing one’s job, but it could be about losing one’s home or other people losing their job.

I wonder why the Squeeze singer, Chris Difford, escaped a driving ban after pleading that it would cause exceptional hardship as he would no longer be able to travel the country playing gigs. The 57-year-old, who earns up to £100,000 a year performing around the country, was caught doing 88 mph on a 70 mph road. The son of Tony Christie, famous for his song “Amarillo”, claimed exceptional hardship because he would not be able to drive his dad to gigs after he had totted up 25 points. The jockey Kieren Fallon escaped a driving ban after he claimed that it would cause exceptional hardship because the state of the racing industry was such that he could not afford a full-time driver. Premiership footballer Zak Whitbread who admitted speeding at 97 mph with 17 points escaped a ban after saying that he would not be able to find another football job if he could not drive. There are many other cases of people who have escaped bans. Not all those 8,000 people are famous, but often they are rich enough to pay a good barrister to get them off.

Drivers cannot use the same exceptional hardship plea each time they are taken to court, but there is no central record of which plea has been used. There is also no record of whether drivers are involved in later accidents. If a driver can clock up 47 points, 27 points, or even just 15 points, it seems to me that they have a disregard for the law and therefore pose a risk to other road users.

We need to tackle not only the sentencing of people convicted of causing death or serious injury by dangerous driving, but the whole issue of driving offences and our attitude to the way cars can be used as weapons. We need drivers to realise at every level of offence that bad behaviour will be punished in order to make our roads safer. Some 83% of the people who took The Bolton News survey believe that 12 points should mean that people are banned. We know that young people aged between 15 and 24 are more likely to die in road traffic accidents than as a result of any other single cause.

We also need to do a great deal more to educate people about the consequences of driving badly. I was visited in my surgery on Friday by the brother of a man who was involved in a road traffic accident 30 years ago. A 14-year-old girl was killed in the accident and the man’s brother—I will call him Peter—suffered devastating injuries. He is now unable to walk properly and cannot go out without assistance. More crucially, he has an acquired brain injury that leaves him dependent on care 24 hours a day. Yes, he got compensation to help pay for the carers, but the money is now running out. His life has been ruined by the accident, and the lives of his parents and siblings have been drastically affected. Of course, a young life was also lost in the accident. What makes it worse is the fact that he was partly to blame, because he was speeding—a Jack the lad who thought that he was invincible. Still, a life was ruined and a life was lost.

For me, this is not just about increasing penalties but about enforcing the law and educating young people about the consequences of road accidents. We need to look at graduated licences for young people. We need to ensure that action is taken rapidly on dangerous roads. I have one such road in my constituency where there have been a number of fatalities, but we have been very slow to alter the road to make it safer.

Of course we need justice for those who have lost loved ones. Yes, we need deterrents, but we know that the number of deaths is sadly increasing. We have to take road safety and driving behaviour seriously and do everything in our power across the whole spectrum, from the point at which people start offending behaviour in a car to the final catastrophic effects of a terrible accident. I urge the Minister to do everything possible to see how we could strengthen legislation to try to stop these terrible accidents happening in our communities.