Road Safety and the Legal Framework

Liz McInnes Excerpts

Tuesday 20th November 2018 Westminster Hall

[Liz McInnes (Heywood and Middleton) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Betts. I am grateful for the opportunity to speak in this important debate. I want to talk about deaths and serious injuries caused by dangerous drivers and the legislation around sentencing.

Many Members will be aware that in response to pressure and campaigning from bereaved families, MPs and the road safety charity Brake with its “Roads to Justice” campaign, the Government finally agreed in December 2016 to hold a consultation on sentencing for those who cause death and serious injury by dangerous driving. The consultation ran until February 2017 and received more than 9,000 responses.

In October last year, the Government announced that, as a result of the consultation, they would introduce tougher sentences for those causing death and serious injury by dangerous driving, including the possibility of life sentences to replace the current maximum sentence of 14 years. When that was announced more than a year ago, there was much relief among campaigners and bereaved families that at last the Government were taking action to ensure that other families would not have to suffer the same injustices. Not only were those families sentenced to a lifetime of grief at the loss of a loved one, but they suffered the injustice of seeing their loved one’s killer receive a prison sentence of just a few years.

Ian and Dawn Brown-Lartey, in my constituency, had a 25-year-old son, Joseph, who was killed by a 19-year-old driving an uninsured and unlicensed hired Audi at 80 mph in a 30 mph zone. He ran through a red light and smashed into Joseph’s car, killing him outright. Joseph’s killer was imprisoned for six years in May 2015 and has since been released on licence after serving half his sentence. Joseph’s father, Ian, has accused the Government of paying lip service to their promises a year ago to impose stiffer punishments on the most dangerous offenders who cause fatal crashes, because nothing has happened since then. No draft legislation has appeared and, despite numerous questions, letters and debates, no changes have been made to the sentencing guidelines. The longer the Government drag their feet over implementing the changes, the more families will continue to suffer.

In just the past two weeks in my constituency we have had one fatality and two cases of serious injury to pedestrians on our roads. In two out of the three cases the drivers were arrested for dangerous driving. When I read those stories in the local paper, my heart sank at the thought of the anguish that the victims’ families must be going through, not only in dealing with death or serious injury, but knowing that, with the law as it stands, if the drivers are convicted of dangerous driving they will serve only a short sentence.

With the anniversary of the Government’s announcement that tougher sentences would be introduced, and with no action having yet been taken, I again wrote to the Ministry of Justice asking when the legislation would be passed. Disappointingly, the message I received yesterday was that there was no available legislative slot to introduce a Bill, or a suitable Bill that could be used to introduce the changes. So families continue to suffer, and the Government, having promised bereaved families more than a year ago that they would take action, have delivered nothing.