Road Traffic Accident Prevention

Rebecca Harris Excerpts

Tuesday 6th December 2016 Westminster Hall

[Mr Sheerman]

That is a brilliant intervention, because it is in the later part of my speech! It is true that the very sophisticated dashboard that some models of car now have, showing drivers not only how to park—self-parking—but all the hazards and all the different information that they can log into, is becoming an area of great concern, but the reason I have kept to a good, true and relatively sane path in transport safety is that I was converted by some of the best scientists in our universities and in the Transport Research Laboratory and other places to always remember: do not go for hearts and flowers; go for good science, good evidence, and what works in countries such as ours. I have always stuck to that, and it has guided me and my colleagues very well.

Understandably, there is an uprising of feeling when something dreadful happens, and recently we have seen some dreadful things—families being killed, mothers with children being killed, by distracted drivers. We know about that, but we have to bear it in mind that, overall, good science, good evidence, should be the watchword. I look at my friend the hon. Member for Rossendale and Darwen (Jake Berry)—he is a friend on these matters particularly—and I say, “Let’s do the science. Let’s do the evaluation of the level of distraction caused by every innovation, including the new design of car interiors.” I think that that should be ongoing. I have not seen the results of research on that, but I know that it is a worrying area.

In Europe, 26,300 people died last year, and there was a slightly rising curve in our own country. I want now to mention the Twitter involvement in this debate. May I commend it, Mr Hollobone? What a wonderful innovation it is that now, when there is to be a Westminster Hall debate, we can involve the broader public by asking what they think about the debate we are to have on the following day. We had one for an hour yesterday. There was a lot of involvement and there were excellent ideas.

One of the top concerns for people was driver education. There is no doubt that young people are very vulnerable in the early years after they first learn to drive, when there are many accidents. There is evidence of young people not driving in the proper way and of that leading to pretty horrific casualties—the deaths and serious injuries of young people in their teens and early twenties.

My wife knows me extremely well—we have been married a very long time and have four children and 10 grandchildren; I do not know if that is a record among those in the Chamber, but I would not mind putting a bet on it—and always thought I had something of the Italian in my driving style, but I once amazed her by passing the test for the advanced driving certificate. I took the advanced drivers’ course possibly because I thought I was not a very good driver. A lot of evidence shows that good driving behaviour comes from good learning and good education early in a young person’s career. I talked to a chief constable in one of the coastal towns in which we used to have party conferences three or four years ago, and he said, “I am not so worried these days about young people having accidents; I am worried about elderly people who share with younger children a diminishing ability to judge distance and speed, and who drive very badly as they get older. There is no one in the family with the guts to say, ‘Mum, Dad—it’s time you stopped driving.” We therefore need good training at the early age and at the later age, and to ensure that the Government do all that they can so that young people and older people are well educated on this life-and-death issue.

More than 200 tweets yesterday wanted distractions to be given a top priority. One of the largest distractions that people are talking about these days is mobile phones, and I absolutely agree that there should be that level of public interest. Yesterday there was the interest in the issue of drink and drugs, and we have had steady improvement. The Minister knows that I am concerned that there is still not an effective roadside test for alcohol, so that people do not have to take up so much police time by going to the police station for testing, and so on. We have roadside testing for drugs but not for alcohol at the moment. However, there is no doubt that the real priority for the public is the distraction caused by mobile phones.

We see high-profile cases in which people who are distracted by their mobile phones cause dreadful accidents. I do not want to go into all the recent tragic cases, but many in this Chamber will know of the family killed by the lorry driver who was scrolling through songs on his phone. That was a terrible thing to have happened, and I can see why anyone who loses their lovely family, or members of their family, wants the strongest possible sentence available for that sort of behaviour. I have a lot of respect for that view, although it does sometimes lead people to look for a silver-bullet solution for the problems that we face. There is no silver bullet, but there is the evaluation of all accidents backed up by good evidence. Although I have sympathy with the idea of having stiff penalties for people who use their mobile phones or who drink or take drugs and drive, it will not save all those lives. It is more complicated than that.

There is also less public knowledge about the risk of drivers with poor eyesight. Road crashes due to poor driver vision are estimated to cause 2,900 casualties in the UK every year. I am not advertising Vision Express—my glasses are not from Vision Express, by the way—but its interesting survey found that 94% of people are unaware that vision can deteriorate by up to 40% before the driver starts to notice. Leaving drivers to self-report poor eyesight seems to Vision Express—I share this view—not to be a good idea. I certainly noticed as I got older that my vision, especially at dusk and when driving at night, was not as good as it should be. I recommend that we have tighter control on tests of good vision for drivers, certainly as they get older.

[Rebecca Harris (Castle Point) (Con)]

I want to intervene before the hon. Gentleman gives my entire speech. Does he agree that too few people really understand about the loss of eyesight and the fact that they lose their eyesight in the way that they do? We need to do more as a nation to publicise it and get people to recognise it.

[Mr Sheerman]

The hon. Lady is absolutely right. I will not detain the Chamber for long with the rest of my speech, but I add that the UK is one of only five EU countries that does not legally require drivers to be tested by a medical or optical professional as part of their driving test, so she is absolutely right.

Another issue that is becomingly increasingly evident—with this I will upset the Minister—is the lack of police officers making sure that our roads are safe. The number of road traffic officers is down 23% from 2010. I raised this issue on Monday in Home Office questions, which you were there for, Mr Hollobone. The night before, I was coming back from Cambridge, with my wife driving, and on the M11 an enormous rescue van—a lorry—with another lorry on top was proceeding at over 65 mph where there was a 50 mph limit. The size and weight of that in an accident would have killed a lot of people. Road traffic technology is able to detect such drivers. There are those who drive—I said “like maniacs”, but perhaps that was a bit harsh—in a very dangerous fashion with no fear that there will be a flashing blue light and that they will be pulled over, and I have to say there is a relationship between proper policing on the roads and good detection. I go to many conferences on transport safety and have spoken at a number of big conferences this summer. I see wonderful technology there, but that will not replace the police—in cars and on motorbikes—on our roads. That point will probably upset the Minister most; he and I usually get on quite well.

The Government have said that they are serious about making our roads safer, but I will ask the Minister about another thing that will upset him—that is, targets. For some reason, both the coalition and the present Governments believed that targets are not the sort of thing that they should have. They do not like them, and there is a kind of ideological resistance to them. However, all the research across the world—he knows I believe in research—shows that if we do not have targets for road casualty reduction, we do not get the reduction. We have to have a road casualty reduction programme. That is a very important point. I do not know of any leading expert, in or out of the Government, who honestly disagrees with that view. We need targets in order to get a reduction.

I was taken by the people who got involved with us on Twitter yesterday and said that we need to have that wonderful, but perhaps unrealistic, target of zero casualties and zero deaths on our roads. That is visionary and optimistic, but we know that targets work. We all know that we do not get casualty reduction in any country, or any part of a country, without a partnership and a team that have passion and leadership and care about this useless waste of life.

Mr Hollobone, you know that I am passionate about this issue. I know that not enough of our colleagues in the House of Commons are still interested enough in transport safety. It is a bit unfashionable and not sexy enough for some, but it is vital to the people that we represent.

--- Later in debate ---

[Rebecca Harris (Castle Point) (Con)]

Thank you very much for calling me in this important debate, Mr Hollobone. As the Minister is well aware, I have been campaigning for a long time to raise awareness of the issue of drivers being medically fit to drive, particularly focusing on drivers having regular eye tests to prevent unnecessary casualties on our roads. I have been doing so ever since I met one of my constituents, Rev. Brenda Gutberlet, who told me the tragic story of her niece, Natalie, who, at the age of 28 and using a pedestrian crossing properly, was knocked down by a driver who knew he was unfit to drive because his eyes were too poor. He killed Natalie and she died on Valentine’s day 2006. Her death was entirely preventable and the family have been campaigning tirelessly ever since to try to make improvements.

There have been improvements—in particular, the introduction in 2013 of Cassie’s law, giving the police the power immediately to ban from driving anyone who fails a roadside test. The law was particularly welcome and I have seen it in action myself. I went out with my road safety reduction partnership in Essex, led by the superb Adam Pipe. I was in a car with a road safety traffic officer who pulled over a gentleman driving at 20 mph on a dual carriageway. When tested at the roadside, he failed the number plate test at five metres. He was a very nice elderly gentleman who did not realise how bad his eyesight was and reported to us that he had not has his eyes tested since he was in the Army. We were able to take his licence off him, get him home and refer him to get a prescription.

The nub of the matter is that there are people out there who do not appreciate how much their eyesight has deteriorated because the brain adjusts and they get used to it. They start saying, “Well, it’s a bit blurry, but I can kind of see and I am only doing local journeys.” We really need to get the message across to people who knowingly drive with poor eyesight and to those who, frankly, do not realise that they are driving with insufficient eyesight to be safely behind the wheel of a car.

The hon. Member for Huddersfield (Mr Sheerman) mentioned the statistics in recent research by Vision Express. It thinks that about 3,000 casualties a year are caused by poor eyesight, but it is hard to know because they are not all recorded and it is not always obvious that they were due to poor eyesight, so there could be many more. We need statistics, but we also need to ensure that drivers understand their responsibility, particularly when they get to about 40 and their sight problems start to fall off the edge of a cliff. An awful lot of people simply have not had their eyes tested since they took their driving test, which was, on average, 15 or so years ago, and for many a great deal longer.

To be honest, I am not calling for compulsory sight testing. I do not think we necessarily need to legislate, but we could do things such as using electronic motorway displays to remind people of the need to take tests, as Brake and Vision Express have been calling for. They would like to see gantry signs saying, “Eye tests save lives.” Perhaps we could also do something like asking people, when they renew their licence, not just, “Are you fit to drive?”—that is easy to tick and say yes to—but, “Have you had an eye test within the last couple of years?” It is much harder for someone to prove that they have had an eye test.

We take our cars for an MOT every year to ensure they are roadworthy. Why should we not do the same thing for our eyes, which are equally important when it comes to driving? Many opticians offer free tests and many groups are eligible for them. Even if people are not eligible for a free test, the cost of an eye test is considerably less than the cost of a full tank of petrol. The cost of even the most expensive prescription is a fraction of what it costs for the privilege of staying on the road. I call for more awareness of the need for eye testing. I would very much like to ensure that it is a necessity for people’s sight to be sufficient for them to be fit to be behind the wheel, and for driving with poor eyesight to be as socially unacceptable as drink and drug-driving is today.