M5 Motorway Accident

Meg Munn Excerpts

Monday 7th November 2011 Commons Chamber

[Justine Greening]

The right hon. Gentleman makes an excellent point. During both my trip to the scene and local hospitals and that of the Under-Secretary of State, my hon. Friend the Member for Hemel Hempstead, the point was constantly made to us about the extremely effective way in which a number of different agencies had worked together. For example, at the hospital that I visited in Taunton, staff talked to me about how they had in place an emergency process for dealing with such an incident, and it worked extremely well when an incident finally happened. There are best practice lessons to be taken from that, and we will certainly work to ensure that they are disseminated to other agencies across the rest of the country. I hope that the Highways Agency will play a key role in that.

[Meg Munn (Sheffield, Heeley) (Lab/Co-op)]

I welcome the Secretary of State’s personal commitment to road safety, because every single death is a tragedy. May I ask her to look again at the framework that her Department has developed? I believe that there has unfortunately been a tendency to see an increase in safety measures, such as better eyesight testing, as a burden rather than as something that will save lives.

[Justine Greening]

In all this we must strike the right balance, but I can absolutely assure the hon. Lady that I take incredibly seriously the issue of safety not just on the roads but across the transport system. I will take a very careful look at it to ensure that we always strike that balance. The strategic framework for road safety that we published in May contained a number of steps in the right direction. I would of course like to consider what more we can do, but we have, for example, increased fixed penalty notice fines for many motoring offences. The fixed penalty notice fine for speeding had not risen since 2000. The Government are taking a number of steps to ensure that we have a very proactive approach to road safety.