Road Traffic Accidents: Hand-held Mobile Devices

Lord Tunnicliffe Excerpts

Thursday 15th December 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Tunnicliffe (Lab)]

My Lords, this is at its heart a debate about dangerous driving, and it is a sobering subject. We have heard throughout the debate of cases in which people have lost their lives, or lost a loved one, because a driver was distracted through using their phone while behind the wheel. It is striking, when you hear about these families, that such devastation has been caused by a few seconds of distraction, something as trivial as a driver wanting to change the song they listen to next. It is a dreadful thing to put somebody else’s life in such great danger. Awareness needs to be raised of how dangerous it is. With that in mind, I congratulate the noble Baroness on securing this debate.

It has been more than 10 years since the Labour Government introduced the offence of using your mobile phone while driving. However, use of a mobile phone was a contributory factor in 22 fatal collisions in 2015. The police regard mobile phone use as one of the “fatal four” causes of road accidents, alongside speeding, drink-driving and not wearing a seat belt. Research by the RAC points to things getting worse rather than better. A survey taken in September found that 31% of drivers used a hand-held phone behind the wheel, up from 8% who admitted to doing so in 2014. Drivers admitted to taking photos and videos while driving, or posting on social media. A sizeable culture shift needs to happen.

Drink-driving used to be accepted as something that happened regularly. It is no longer socially acceptable. People know that it is illegal to get behind the wheel drunk or under the influence. They know why it is illegal. They consider it reckless and know that it puts other people’s lives in danger. Public awareness, education and enforcement have all worked together to reduce the number of incidents and the number of people who would ever consider drinking and driving. This is a cause to be hopeful. We know that it is possible to tackle a problem and make our roads safer because it has been done before and so can be done again.

We welcome the Government’s decision to increase the penalties for using a mobile phone while driving. Labour has been pushing the Government to act on this issue, which has been worsening in recent years on their watch. The increase from three points to six means that a driver who is caught on their phone twice will face the possibility of disqualification by the courts. Novice drivers who are caught for the first time may have to take their test again. Tougher penalties are part of the package that is needed to demonstrate the severity of the offence and the heartbreaking consequences it can have. Have the Government had discussions about applying an outright ban to those caught using their phone while driving? This is available for those driving or attempting to drive while over the alcohol limit. Is there a reason the Government settled on a six-point penalty? What is being done to educate drivers so that they are aware of the new penalties and that using a phone while driving is a serious offence?

There is a problem of the Government’s own making, which they have not yet faced up to. We have the law, education and awareness-raising, and the last part of the puzzle is enforcement. It does not matter how severe the penalty is if we rarely manage to use it. Penalties are hardly a disincentive if they are not applied when they are deserved. It remains far more of a challenge to convince people that behaviour is reckless and constitutes a serious offence if they are never pulled over for it.

In 2010, over 35,000 drivers had court proceedings instigated against them for using a mobile phone while driving. In five years of Conservative-led Government, that enforcement record fell year by year. By 2015, half the number of the drivers were being dealt with in court for this growing, life-threatening offence. The number of fixed penalty notices dropped from over 123,000 in 2011 to under 17,000 last year. Drivers are getting away with it. Mobile phone use is not picked up automatically, as speeding is currently. It takes enforcement, but this Government have cut police resources and depleted the ability of our police forces to enforce the law. Home Office figures show that local areas have lost, on average, 27% of their dedicated road police. We therefore have to ask the Government, if they are taking this offence as seriously as they claim to and as seriously as they should, what are they doing to improve these abysmal enforcement figures?

I will say a word or two about some of the previous contributions. The noble Baroness, Lady Pidding, and a number of other noble Lords talked about smart systems. Those of us who have relatively modern cars have at least semi-smart systems, and there is much to commend them. However, I look to the Government to say what they are doing to advance research into smart systems to make them even more effective. The noble Baroness also raised the issue of public information films. Of course, when the Government came to power in 2010, they cut back quite radically on the use of such media. Some of the campaigns that were run in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s—not just on drink-driving but on AIDS, for example—were value for money. The Government should reconsider the use of high-quality campaigns.

My noble friend Lord Campbell-Savours shared with us his data-gathering skills and brought home that this is a widespread offence, and considerable effort is needed to tackle it. His idea of immediate automatic checks by the police after anyone has been involved in an accident has some value, and I hope the Minister will react to that. We automatically check drivers for alcohol after an accident, and this would have a similar chilling effect. My noble friend also commended the use of technology.

It was important for us to listen to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf, whose cautionary words on sentence escalation are important. Somehow, in our whole system, we have got it wrong. We have too much incarceration and not enough other thoughtful ways to tackle offences. He told the white line story. I am not an expert on the judicial or criminal world, but my understanding is that where sentences have been overly severe, prosecution rates have fallen because juries have been reluctant to come forward with a guilty finding. There were periods in which the death penalty, for instance, was widely available but not much used because of a sense of revulsion about excessive sentencing. We have to move from relying on very excessive sentences to looking at the whole question of how to change attitudes.

The idea of a campaign was a theme that ran through many of the contributions. The noble and learned Lord touched on that when he talked about people who kill someone in an accident being scarred and having to live with it for the rest of their life. That got to me. The one thing that came out of the drink-driving campaign that influences my driving behaviour is the thought of killing somebody and wondering how I would live with that for the rest of my life. We somehow have to embed that idea in the souls of our drivers.

I come back to a point that was made by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf. We know that the most powerful deterrent to crime is detection rates. High crime detection rates have a much bigger impact than sentencing. The noble Baroness, Lady Newlove, covered many of the same points. My noble friend Lord Hunt took us back once again to the 1960s. It is very clever, and I do not know how we did it, but culturally people have moved on from that period. The Government should take up his idea of a mobile use element to speeding courses. Such courses are occasions when you have a cultural handle on a driver. The driver has already made the decision to take an educational, as opposed to a punitive, route, and he is possibly in the right frame of mind to absorb that sort of information. It would be interesting to know whether the Government are doing any behavioural research as a means of tackling this problem.

Finally, we were left with a distinction between distractions and dangers. I have spent most of my life in safety-critical industries. The reality is that you always worry about proportionality, and it is something we have to build into this culture. If you are listening to a complex radio programme—“In Our Time” on a Thursday morning is a good example—and trying to manoeuvre in difficult traffic conditions, there is no question but that the act of listening affects your powers of concentration. We have to get people to think in a much more holistic way about their behaviour when they drive. This is an issue on which Members on all sides wish to see progress.

I end my remarks with a rather more hopeful question about how the Government plan to measure success in this area. What sort of monitoring will be done to gauge the effectiveness of the new penalties and the awareness campaign, and to judge what is working and what more may need to be done? Behavioural change, as we know, takes time. It is my hope that we may speed it up a bit by ensuring that drivers know that a couple of irresponsible seconds behind the wheel can cost someone’s life.

Railways: Industrial Action

Lord Tunnicliffe Excerpts

Wednesday 7th December 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon]

I know that my noble friend speaks from personal experience and exasperation at some of the challenges she has faced. I fully accept that many Members of your Lordships’ House are in the same position. That is why I have directly initiated, in co-operation with the Leader of the House, a regular review of some of the challenges which are directly being faced or on which representations have been made to Members of your Lordships’ House on this important issue. As I have already said, the Government have appointed Chris Gibb to look at what actions can be taken to ensure that both the train operating company and Network Rail, which operates the track, work together on finding a reasonable, fast and efficient solution.

[Lord Tunnicliffe (Lab)]

My Lords, in my career I have been a striker, thanks to the noble Lord, Lord Tebbit, a shop steward, an industrial relations negotiator, a line manager and a managing director. I have been through more disputes than I care to think about, and every dispute has had two sides. Is not the Minister painting a simplistic picture to say that it is just the trade unions? The Government control Network Rail and pull the strings of the train operating company; will they get in there and do something to solve this problem?

[Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon]

I fully respect the noble Lord’s wide experience. However, I am sure that when he reads Hansard, he will see that I have not given a simplistic solution in my replies. It is a challenging situation, and, equally, I have accepted the principle that it is not just the strikes and that other challenges are caused by problems with both Network Rail and the train operating company. There is a need to find a solution, but the strikes are not helping. That is the point I was making.