Motorways

Lord Dear Excerpts

Wednesday 30th March 2011 Grand Committee

[Lord Dear]

My Lords, I start by congratulating the noble Lord, Lord Trefgarne, on securing this debate today. It is a subject that has caused me some concern and indeed distress for some years. It was 30 years or so ago that the Home Office and the Department for Transport put forward a formula that sought to indicate the numbers of police patrol vehicles that should be on motorways or A-class trunk roads. It varied according to motorway or A-class trunk road and varied according to day or night. Those numbers were never achieved; they were seen to be extravagant, even 30 years ago. But although they were never achieved, the fact was that in those days, and right up to 15 years or so ago, chief constables deployed something between 7 per cent and 10 per cent of their total strength on road motor patrol duty, dedicated to the patrol of A-class roads and motorways and dealing with the situations that occurred on them.

When one looked at the work rate of those officers, a lot of it was not to do with traffic incidents at all. It was to do with major crime being committed on the motorways or criminals using the motorway network and the A-class trunk roads to travel about in pursuit of crime, carrying stolen property, and so on. The numbers of arrests made by traffic officers in that theatre of police work was considerable, impressive and undoubtedly a potential deterrent to criminals, who would have to think several times before venturing out onto a motorway or main road network.

Things are very different now. There is an old adage—tired and much used—that you can never find a police officer when you want one. It could never be truer than if one drives around the main road networks of this country. I have to say—and it saddens me to say so—that there has been a complete retreat from the targeted policing of main roads and motorways in this country. As the noble Lord, Lord Trefgarne, has already alluded, in 1989 I set up the Central Motorway Patrol Group, which is a consortium of police forces that is still working and which patrols that big industrial complex in the centre of the country, drawing officers from the West Midlands police, which I commanded at that time, Warwickshire, Staffordshire and West Mercia. I think that Warwickshire has dropped out of it now, but certainly the group still patrols vigorously, accurately and with considerable success. It was copied in the north-west, as has already been said—in Manchester—and for a time was also copied on the M25 ring, although I believe that has now dropped away.

Elsewhere the patchwork is very poor indeed. One could say that the cupboard was virtually bare. The police patrolling of main roads, including A-class roads, is sparse to the point of invisibility. I drive around 20,000 miles a year, frequently on a 400-mile or so round trip from the Midlands to North Yorkshire and beyond, and I can say with absolute confidence that on most of those journeys I never see a police patrol vehicle, yet those motorways have some of the heaviest traffic in the country. There is not even a token police vehicle. In my own rural county in the centre of the country, I drive around on all the main roads and motorways in that small area, and I cannot remember the last time that I saw a dedicated police road patrol vehicle.

As the noble Lord has already said, those who work for the Highways Agency are about. One frequently sees them in operations on motorways clearing up after an accident or picking up debris. Occasionally, it is true that the police are there dealing with an accident, coning off and taking statements and so forth at the scene of the incident. But those vehicles that are turning up frequently, although they are equipped to deal with the aftermath of accidents, are being deployed the majority of the time as response cars for other incidents within the totality of policing. They will only be deployed onto the main road to deal with the incident as and when it happens. They are then redeployed back to the plethora of 999 calls and other calls on police time.

The fact is that motorway and A-class road patrolling has been virtually abandoned by the police. It grieves me to say so, but it also concerns not only me—a small part of the equation—it concerns the motoring organisations as well. With one voice and frequently, they have drawn attention to it.

One hears a number of views expressed in defence of what is happening. One has already been mentioned: that cameras and automatic number plate recognition or ANPR can produce a result. To counter that, I would say that no chief officer of police could get away with a statement that said that he had totally left the policing of the city centre to cameras and that there would be no police presence in uniform at all. He could not sustain that argument. Yet the argument that we can apparently do with just cameras and ANPR is apparently allowed to be applied to main roads. That is not acceptable.

Another argument that is deployed is that road deaths are going down. So they are, but they still stand at something like 3,000 a year. Much of that reduction is down to better provision of engineering on the roads—the increased safety design of motor vehicles and the speed and expertise of casualty evacuation—CASEVAC—from the scene to the hospital. All of that will contribute to a smaller number of deaths on the roads. It is true that motorways are numerically the safest roads on which to travel in terms of numbers of accidents, although one has to say that when an accident occurs it is normally catastrophic because of the speeds that are involved.

I have already mentioned to your Lordships that crime takes place on motorways and the products of crime are travelled through motorways. Many criminals are thoughtful people. They use vehicles and travel immense distances across borders, taking part in criminal activities. They know full well that the cameras are there. Any thoughtful criminal will not use a car that they guess will be on the register, flagged up with a warning note. They will almost certainly either hire a vehicle or get hold of a vehicle that they know is, in the parlance, clean.

What about plain cars? I introduced them in the West Midlands with on-board cameras—the first major experiment in the country. The scheme was copied by various forces in the country shortly afterwards. I know the tell-tale signs to look for on plain cars, which are not particularly apparent, but I look for them and do not see plain cars very often either.

The problem grew from the target culture introduced by the Home Office in 1999, 2000 or thereabouts. A whole plethora of performance indicators were visited on chief officers of police with which they had to comply. It is interesting to note that not one single performance indicator required attention to road transport or road safety matters. There was nothing to do with roads. Chief constables predictably moved away and concentrated on other things. Ministers will say, quite rightly, that deployment of reasonable resources is solely a matter for the chief officer, and so it is. I do not say that Ministers could have done more in this instance at all. The sad fact is that chief officers of police have taken their eyes off main road patrolling. They will pray in aid increased demand of workload elsewhere and shortened budgets, but I do not think that that is good enough.

It is not good enough when, as has already been alluded to, one considers the huge value of the loads being transported across the motorway network on an hourly and yearly basis; the huge numbers of people who travel on the motorways; and the potential for very serious incidents and accidents. All Ministers can do is to encourage—I appreciate that they cannot go any further than encouraging—chief officers, by whatever means necessary and possible, to collaborate together. As has already been mentioned, there is a call for regional motorway patrol groups across the country, and that may well be worth looking at. One way or another, they must bring to the notice of the public, and thereby to chief officers of police, the fact that motorways at the moment are not policed. They must encourage the police to do so and to recognise that the present situation is unacceptable.