Transport Committee
Oral evidence: Road safety strategy, HC 81
Wednesday 3 June 2026
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 3 June 2026.
Members present: Ruth Cadbury (Chair); Steff Aquarone; Dr Scott Arthur; Mrs Elsie Blundell; Jacob Collier; Olly Glover; Alex Mayer; Laurence Turner.
Questions 1–85
Witnesses
I: Steve Cole, Director of Policy and Impact, Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents; Nicholas Lyes, Policy and External Communications Director, IAM RoadSmart; Steve Gooding, Director, RAC Foundation; Jamie Hassall, Executive Director, Parliamentary Advisory Council for Transport Safety; Ross Moorlock, Chief Executive Officer, Brake.
Written evidence from witnesses:
– Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents
– Parliamentary Advisory Council for Transport Safety
– Brake
Witnesses: Steve Cole, Nicholas Lyes, Steve Gooding, Jamie Hassall and Ross Moorlock.
Chair: Welcome to this morning’s evidence session. This is the first evidence session of the Committee inquiry into the Government’s road safety strategy. We will be scrutinising the key components of the strategy, including ambitions and targets, to inform the next stages of our inquiry. We are aware that there may be references to distressing topics. Please could I ask witnesses and members not to mention individual cases where there may be ongoing legal proceedings? I will start by asking each of the panel to introduce themselves.
Steve Cole: I am the director of policy and impact at the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents.
Jamie Hassall: I am the executive director of PACTS, the Parliamentary Advisory Council for Transport Safety.
Nicholas Lyes: I am director of policy and external communications at IAM RoadSmart.
Ross Moorlock: I am chief executive officer at Brake, the road safety charity.
Steve Gooding: I am the director of the RAC Foundation.
Q1 Chair: Welcome. You will all have an opportunity to answer my opening question, but there is no need to repeat things that others have said. As we go through the session, do not feel that you have to answer my colleagues’ questions if others have appropriately answered them. We will try to be fair and make sure you all get an equal chance to speak.
The Government present the road safety strategy as a turning point after a decade of stalled progress. Do you think its contents broadly live up to that claim?
Steve Cole: We very much welcome the strategy. We would definitely agree on the decade of stalled progress line. I am sure everyone knows that the rate of road collisions only improved by 7% over the last decade, compared with 45% in previous years. We cover all accident types at RoSPA. I will use “accidents” as a term; I mean collisions in this context but we are not the Royal Society for the Prevention of Collisions, unfortunately, so treat it as a synonym in this instance. We run an annual review of accidents that takes into account all different typologies across the UK.
Road safety collisions remain the third biggest cause of accidental death in this country, and it is similar for hospitalisation rates, which is a very serious issue, so we really welcome this. I am sure we will come on to that. Our question is not necessarily about the content or the direction of the strategy. The key challenge is the implementation of it, given that we have lost the previous decade, and how we move at pace to get to the relevant solutions from the very laudable aims of the strategy.
Jamie Hassall: I will add that it is the best strategy we have had in 15 years, but it lacks some pace. It is really ambitious: to hit that target we are talking about a 9% reduction in KSIs year on year. It was slow to get the strategy. We are currently going through a consultation period; we are told that that will feed back in the autumn. Our concern is that there is very little happening straight away. We have a really ambitious target, but we are not quick off the starting mark, shall we say.
Chair: We will get into the meat of that in our subsequent questions.
Nicholas Lyes: I would agree with that, and it is worth pointing out that Ministers should actually be congratulated for putting forward something that has ambitious targets. I am sure we will come on to talk about the targets and all the policies, but just to add to what Jamie said, it is really important that we have some policies that have some meat on them, that they are taken forward and they are given a time stamp as well.
Ross Moorlock: I echo all the comments already made. The new road safety strategy to tackle the unacceptable level of road death and injury on our roads has to mark a turning point for road safety in this country. For the first time in almost 15 years, it feels as if road safety is back on the national agenda.
We welcome the new framework and the commitments to the safe system and action to prevent crashes and injuries and to save lives that are set out within it, but we absolutely urge the Government to be brave and bold when it comes to the next steps. What is on paper is a solid foundation, a good starting point, but that now needs to translate into action and urgency very quickly.
Steve Gooding: I would add two things to the comments that the rest of the panel have made about pace. First, there is a lot of stuff in there, a lot of measures, and there is a lot to do. Secondly, a lot of the things I suspect we will find ourselves talking about this morning come down to, “It depends.” There are commitments in there, but the devil will be in the detail of what those commitments turn out to be when they are brought into being.
Q2 Chair: Picking up on that—and I will start with Steve—where do you think the biggest gap lies between the ambition of the strategy and the practical measures?
Steve Gooding: It would be lovely to think that there was a silver bullet answer to the tragedy of road death and serious injury. Having worked in this area for quite a long time, I do not think there is. The strategy rightly recognises that we are in a sort of Dave Brailsford world of cycling where every second counts, so there are lots and lots of measures to pursue there, rather than one that I would point out in particular to be the answer.
To illustrate the point I was making before, though, we have argued—others have joined the argument—for having a road safety investigation branch. There is a commitment to create such a thing, but exactly what it is going to be, what resources it is going to have and what access it is going to have to datasets is, as yet, unclear. We think that that is something where early progress could be made.
Chair: Does anyone else have a view on the biggest gap between ambition and practical measures?
Jamie Hassall: There are certain areas. Young drivers make up around 6% of the driving population but about 24% of the KSIs, and the strategy is very quiet on that apart from the learning period. There are bits in there on motorcycles and vulnerable road users, but again they are not overly represented. So yes, some of the big, meaty, potentially tricky areas are a bit light, and we would like to see more information on what is going to happen in those areas to address them.
Q3 Chair: In your evidence you said that there is a danger that targets could cloud focus on day-to-day progress. Can you tell us more about what you meant by that?
Jamie Hassall: The targets are way in advance. We would love to see leading safety indicators and interim targets. As I say, we need to see a 9% reduction year on year, but given the current trajectory, we probably will not see that for the first two years, which means you have to then go harder.
Having more interim steps is really helpful to focus the mind. By the end of this Government I would love to see that we can show that there has been a dent in those KSIs to say, “We’ve had a strategy and it’s made a difference.” At the current rate of events, that might not be the case. That means that if we have a change of Government, they could say, “Oh, it failed, it didn’t work, let’s get rid of it,” whereas the building blocks are there; it would just be nice to see the results within this Parliament so that they could take some credit for it.
Ross Moorlock: In terms of some of the biggest gaps, one of the challenges with the strategy is that it has not been made clear from the interventions, and the commitments made within it that have been consulted on, what the expected outcomes will be or how close the interventions will get us to the targets that have been set. There is some thinking within the sector that the interventions will fall short of reaching those targets. It feels important, then, to turn to where things have perhaps not gone far enough and where there are opportunities to go further.
From a Brake perspective, we would look at speed and national speed measures. We know that speed is a factor in so many crashes, and in two thirds of crashes resulting in death. As Jamie has alluded to, young drivers are an area where the evidence tells us we should go further: that feels like an omission and a gap. From a Brake perspective—we run the National Road Victim Service and support bereaved families and those seriously injured in road crashes—the post-crash component of the safe system is not covered off and is largely ignored within the strategy. That is an area where we would like to see the strategy go much further.
Chair: Thank you. You have outlined some quite major interventions that are needed.
Q4 Steff Aquarone: You started talking about the interim targets. Stepping back, it raises the question whether the current general targets of 65% KSI reduction and 70% for child KSIs are credible. Steve, you mentioned Dave Brailsford, who, to the uninitiated, is famous for using incremental gains to improve British cycling’s performance. That is a hell of a lot of 1% gains, is it not? Maybe we can start with your view on this. Are they credible?
Steve Gooding: I will reveal the fact that I used to be a civil servant by saying that they are bold.
Steff Aquarone: “Bold”—like in “Yes, Minister”.
Steve Gooding: But there is no harm in setting something that is an aspirational target. These are not targets that the Government are hoping to achieve by the skin of their teeth. They are out there, and part of the purpose of setting the targets was to say that collectively we need to have a bold ambition, which is what they have set.
I do not think it is possible to take the list of measures in the strategy and top them up one by one to say, “Well, that is 2%, that is 3%,” because they come in packages. But taking the point about having some lead indicators, which we support, maybe looking at those within the context of the city deals might be a thing to do.
Steff Aquarone: Does anyone else have views on the credibility of these targets?
Steve Cole: We are similarly very supportive of the ambition of it. We have struggled a lot in this space because there has been a lack of ambition around that. We do a lot of work in Scotland and Wales, and actually in the GCC as well, and we see that vision and ambition drives performance.
One of the points to come to on this almost incremental game piece is that a lot of the things in the strategy are evidence-based. This is not something new that is being created; these are things that people know work. While there are some challenges around specific areas of focus, actually with things like vehicle safety technology, licensing reform and speed management interventions, we know these things work. It does not necessarily need the scope of consultation and development to put this into practice quickly while you are trying to do the cleverer, more complicated, different things alongside that.
With the scope of consultation, I worry a little that it is not reflective of where the UK, and England in particular, is in road safety performance. We are almost thinking we are where we were 20 years ago, when we were a global leader, which actually we are not any more. There is a series of proven interventions in this space, quite a few of which are in the strategy that we could implement at pace—I am not going to say “speed”—if we wanted to.
Jamie Hassall: It comes down to political will, because some of the things that might need to be implemented will not be liked; 20 mph speed limits have worked really well in Wales, but the strategy is talking about guidance for local implementation. If you want to hit this target, there are lots of national things you need to do. Yes, there are lots of local delivery and local decisions to be made but there are national leadership and some difficult decisions to be made, and that is what it comes down to. The Government have to put their money where their mouth is.
Q5 Steff Aquarone: Do you mean economic growth trade-offs, or more political trade-offs?
Jamie Hassall: Road safety is good for the economy and good for the country. National Highways targets for the next five years are very disappointing. Every time there is a fatal at the motorway, it closes it for four hours plus, depending on how messy it is. You then have the secondary incidents happening on the local networks as the traffic goes round. Those incidents are massively disruptive to the country and to delivery of goods and services. That is a really important area to focus on.
I was talking to a company recently that had installed the inward/outward-facing cameras. It thought, “We will do this and we will see how bad it is.” It has actually shown that it is saving the company money and now it can pay its drivers a little more for driving well, so safety is worth investing in.
Steff Aquarone: So it is political trade-offs, then?
Jamie Hassall: It is, yes. It is about getting everyone in the country to understand what the benefits are. Sometimes it is how you raise the question. If you talk about 20 mph, they get upset; if you talk about kids getting to school safely, people are very supportive.
Nicholas Lyes: If you ask people whether they would want a 20 mph limit outside their house, they are very supportive. Where they are driving elsewhere, they are not so keen. That is part of the issue here: we have to reframe the narrative somewhat.
When you look at what happens on the strategic road network on a motorway, the point that Jamie made about the economic impact is also important, because if people are stuck in queues they find alternatives. What sort of alternatives? Rural roads. We all know that those types of roads have much higher risks associated with them.
Q6 Steff Aquarone: I am sure we will talk about these very interesting points that you have raised. I am keen to come back to what the evidence measures actually are and, in particular, what may be missing. You talk about established best practice, but do you have any other views about these targets? You have raised National Highways; it told us about the challenges it faces meeting even existing KSI targets. Are there lessons for the Government to learn here?
Ross Moorlock: I echo Steve’s opening comment: the targets are bold. They are ambitious, and rightly so: they should be. We support that. For too long, we have normalised road death and injury on our roads and society has accepted it. It is not acceptable. Road crashes are not inevitable; they are preventable. It is important that we should be taking the action to prevent them.
Looking at the numbers that fellow panel members have talked about, when that scale of reductions has been achieved in the last few decades it has been at very specific moments: the introduction of the seatbelt and the circumstances around the coronavirus pandemic, for example. It is clear that if we are to meet those targets, we need action and bold decision making.
To quickly mention a point that we have touched on, it is really important that we avoid the politicisation of road safety. As soon as we start doing that, we stop following the evidence and start following something else. That is a really dangerous route to go down.
Q7 Steff Aquarone: There is clearly no question of intention behind this strategy, so please keep that in mind when I ask the next question: what evidence? How do we know these policy initiatives are based on evidence, and what is missing that is evidenced but not in the road strategy? You have access to a lot of evidence, Steve. What do you think?
Steve Cole: There is a reasonable point, coming off what Ross was saying. If I came to the transport Minister and said, “I have this brilliant new transport system idea: it’s only going to kill and seriously injure 10,000 people a year,” I would be thrown out the building, quite reasonably. If you look at the hoops that you are jumping through for things like High Speed 2 or autonomous vehicles on the safety front, with these safety controls, we would not approve this now. That is the case for a lot of things in accident prevention—building control, that sort of thing, so it is very much a multi-factorial issue.
In terms of evidence, we know that speed limit control and things like alcohol interlocks work. They all address different aspects of that engineering, enforcement, education process. We also know that public education works, but that is something we have really rowed back on in the last few years.
As RoSPA I can say, hand on heart, that we do far less on public driver education in England than we do in Wales and Scotland, because we are not funded for it. That is not a request for someone to fund us, but we know that that process works and we know we have stepped back on that. The level of investment that has gone into education, particularly for existing drivers, has decreased at a far greater rate than the level of investment that has even gone into physical infrastructure.
There is a long litany of things. The people writing the strategy at DFT know this; it is more about saying, “These are the things we know we can implement in five years so we will do it now. These are the things that are going to take more time and need a more considered approach.” We can certainly send you a long list of interventions that work, but I suspect it would be more about what is appropriate in that time span, which is more of a challenge back to DFT.
Q8 Steff Aquarone: We would be very interested in a list of interventions that we know work. Jamie, what does the evidence tell us about how the biggest KSI reductions could be achieved, in your view?
Jamie Hassall: Speed is the clear one. It is a factor in both the likelihood of a collision and the severity of the outcome. It is also probably the most contentious area. The evidence is there, but it is also about how we approach this. In the Government strategy, it actually picks up how much KSIs are costing UK plc. But that money is hidden away in different places, and there are some areas that use an insurance-based product where the money comes into the central Department that then starts paying the NHS, and stuff like that. It is very clear how much money has been spent on that. The question is, do we keep on paying for the damage that is caused, or do we actually put more money into the prevention?
Q9 Steff Aquarone: Are you saying that the evidence suggests that if you create a straight line between investment and cost-saving in that way, outcomes improve?
Jamie Hassall: Yes. If I asked the question, “How much is spent on road safety in the country?”—
Steff Aquarone: I have no idea.
Jamie Hassall: No one would know. Or, “How much does it cost?” So now we have to figure out how much it costs in delays and medical stuff, which is still a bit of a guesstimate because we do not follow stuff through.
Kuala Lumpur has changed: it does not report serious injuries now, it reports death and life-changing injuries. You can almost follow it through to say, “Okay, someone died here, but actually that affected six people: we have mental health issues, we have all this bereavement and we have six other people who lost limbs. That is a continuing cost to the country.” It is an interesting model. If we could actually understand that this happened here and the ripple effect that has had, and put the money in one place to say, “We now have to pay this out”—with 1% going to prevention, someone would say, “Actually, we have this wrong.”
Q10 Steff Aquarone: I am keen for us to move on, and I am going to ask the others, but briefly, Steve, do you have any further thoughts on whether the strategy actually reflects these insights?
Steve Cole: I am sure we will come on to it, but the other challenge is knowing that the intervention is also about collision investigation, and that gets you into territory of driving and riding for work. We know driving for work is the majority of journeys that people make and that the most dangerous thing you do in a workplace is drive, but we do not get that investigative data out in comparison to things like drowning prevention, which will look very closely at the wider investigative causes. That gives you more of the solutions as well, because then you get more of the economic impacts on business. I am sure we will come on to it, but that is what we find.
Q11 Steff Aquarone: I am sure we will, but that is part of the normalisation thing that you were talking about earlier. Ross, just briefly, in your view and in the broadest sense, does this strategy reflect these insights?
Ross Moorlock: It is important to note that there are lots of great and important things included within the strategy. Brake’s view is that we would like the strategy to go further in what we would define as high-risk areas. The panel have talked about speed, and Brake absolutely supports the strategy going further with some national decision making in relation to speed measures. Young driver risk, graduated driving licensing—the evidence base is incredibly strong there. We may touch upon that later, but we are absolutely urging the Government to go further in that space.
Just to come back to the post-crash component of the safe system, a lot of this discussion will focus on prevention, and it is right that the strategy focuses on that. But let us not forget that as we sit here today, people are dying or suffering serious life-changing injury on our roads; it is really important that we do not let those families down. The system is letting those families down, but it is important that we have the right support in place for those families and we do not neglect their rights and needs as well. It is really important that post-crash support is built into the strategy and the thinking around that as part of the safe system approach, as Jamie has alluded to. It is part of the cost to the public purse of road crashes, and this is happening to families every single day of the year. The prevention piece is important, but it is really important that that post-crash component gets the focus that it deserves.
Q12 Steff Aquarone: Nicholas and then Steve: any brief further comments on the evidence base?
Nicholas Lyes: What is in the strategy reflects where some of the biggest KSI hotspots are, so I would say that that is a positive thing. When you look at the statistics, particularly since 2010, the number of casualties—all casualties of all severities—has come down by about 40%. But then when you look at KSIs, the number is about 13%, so something is working, but something else is not working. I am sure we can get into the theories on what that could be as we go through the session, but when you look at what is in the strategy itself, in terms of the focus on the fatal five—drink-driving, for example—it targets the right areas. One of the things that we would say is perhaps lacking is the prevention of collisions involving motorcyclists. For us, that is an area that really needs to be looked at.
Steve Gooding: The Department for Transport has virtual shelves full of evidence and data. We have some of the best, most comprehensive data anywhere in the world because we have been tracking our road safety record for so many years, so there is a lot of data there. I take you back to the fact that the strategy as published has a lot of things in it. What I would say about what is not there is what I suspect everyone here would say: “Yes, but if only it had this as well!”
We do not want to distract the team. I bring you back to the pace point: they put out a list of things they want to get on with, so for goodness’ sake could they get on with them? Then maybe in a couple of years’ time we can come back to the enhancements, the extra things that we think they might like to get on with. But for goodness’ sake, get on with what you have said you are going to do.
Q13 Mrs Blundell: As we have discussed, the strategy has a long-term ambition that nobody should be killed or seriously injured on our roads, but it does not adopt Vision Zero as a national objective. Some combined authorities, such as Greater Manchester, and local authorities have taken the decision to do that at a more regional level. What practical difference does the distinction of not having that national objective make? Steve, could you start with that one?
Steve Cole: I am happy to. Yes, it refers to it, but we think it should adopt it. It comes back to the point that we were the leaders in this 20 years ago. This is the leading strategic approach for it. We do a lot of work with the Scottish Government, who have adopted Vision Zero. Where it has proved really useful is just in having common language and strategic objectives. We used to do a lot of work with the Mayor of London’s office; negotiating between DFT and Transport for London was complicated, and that is partly about a lack of shared objectives and shared language.
Using a consistent framework, where other parts of the country have already adopted it, is only beneficial; it just means you are not in that mixed position on goals. We have definitely seen that where it has worked well with Scotland is in that focus on prevention, but also the idea that you have a common framework that reduces fragmentation, so you have that consistency of areas across it. That also helps you with focus. As we have said, there is a lot in the strategy; it is how you use that approach to focus on the strategic drivers. That is quite a top-level answer, but that is why it is important: it is at that top level and about that point of communication.
Q14 Mrs Blundell: Would others agree that Government should have adopted Vision Zero as part of this national strategy?
Jamie Hassall: National Highways has a Vision Zero. It was 2040, it has just moved it to 2050, but it has also just signed RIS3 saying that it will deliver a 7.5% reduction in KSIs over five years. It is meaningless if the trajectory is not there, so I agree with Steve that yes, it is a good idea, but it is a big number—who is still going to be working in 2050? I would hope to be retired by then. You could say, “Actually, we will make it 2049, because that is slightly earlier and it looks good,” but it does not mean anything unless there is a proper strategy and programme to deliver it. So yes, I would like to see it, but I am much more interested in what is going to happen in the next five years.
Q15 Mrs Blundell: Does anyone else have comments on Vision Zero?
Ross Moorlock: I echo Jamie’s point about the importance of the clear plan. I absolutely think we should be aiming for Vision Zero—that commitment should be made and should be in the strategy—but there is a risk that we defer this and make road safety someone else’s problem if we do not have that clear delivery plan in place now. The urgency of action is what is really important here and now.
Q16 Mrs Blundell: Understood. In what ways would the strategy have to change if Vision Zero were adopted as a national objective?
Jamie Hassall: It is already based on the safe system, and that safe system is a kind of Vision Zero, so the fact you have not given a date is not necessarily an issue. Rail is very safe, but you will still have people who fall over and die, or other serious things. It is where you want to be, rather than, “From this date, no one will die on the road again,” because unfortunately someone will manage somehow to die on a road. But it should be that it is really the exception.
Q17 Mrs Blundell: Do you not think it matters too much that they have not formally adopted Vision Zero?
Jamie Hassall: I do not think so. As Ross says, it is about the next five years and what is going to happen in the short term. Steve mentioned the road safety investigation branch; that is the most important thing in the strategy. If we get that right, it might actually set us up to have a Vision Zero; if we do not get it right, it will not deliver what it should and it may even just fade away.
Q18 Mrs Blundell: Steve, could we have your response, because you initially had a slightly different view?
Steve Cole: I agree that the tempo in the next five years is more important. If I had to choose one, I would choose tempo. When you get to the stage of iteration beyond that, much more embedding of the principles of Vision Zero through it is important. Again, that is something we have seen from the Scottish and Welsh Governments, and from the Mayor of London as well. It is not necessarily to stop them making quick changes where they can and then looking at that as part of the iteration of the next phases of the strategy. The intent is there, but I would not get too hung up on the badge of it. But as you get through that and have done all the low-hanging fruit in the next couple of years, you would definitely want to be looking at that as part of it.
Mrs Blundell: As you say, the language is important, though.
Steve Cole: Really important.
Q19 Dr Arthur: Just reflecting on Elsie’s question, sometimes I feel that Vision Zero and the safe system have been sloganised, particularly when you have targets that are decades away. I am having my Victor Meldrew moment around the safe system. Sometimes when you have discussions and meetings about road safety, there is too much reliance on vehicle improvements decades into the future, rather than just making improvements in our urban realm and how we manage traffic right now. Is that unfair to say?
Jamie Hassall: Let us come back to Vision Zero. Vehicle safety improvement is really important for Vision Zero because, as you say, it takes 15, 20 or 30 years for the fleet to change, so you need to start doing those things now for the long-term stuff. But in the here and now, stopping people dying is very much about infrastructure, segregating traffic, cyclists from cars and from pedestrians, and that sort of stuff. It is important, but in a sense it is achieving something slightly different.
Q20 Dr Arthur: The road safety strategy uses Sweden as an exemplar. Do you think it is right to do that? Is there anything that Sweden does that we have not imported into the strategy and that perhaps we should?
Nicholas Lyes: Sweden is often seen as the poster child, quite rightly. It adopted Vision Zero 30-odd years ago. It has made significant national progress, and on an international stage it is quite rightly held up. I am sometimes a little cautious about making direct comparisons from country to country, simply because there are different cultures and different ways people do things, but you have to look at the statistics on what has happened in Sweden as a safe system and as Vision Zero and say that it has been a success. That is something that we should all be adopting here in the UK and, I suspect, elsewhere. But if you go and look at other things on an international scale, you might choose to look at Australia’s graduated driving licence system, for example.
Dr Arthur: We will come to that later—probably with broad agreement, actually.
Jamie Hassall: What Sweden has done right is come up with road designs, saying, “These are the three main ones.” In the UK, those three main ones might not quite work, because we have a very particular road infrastructure, but there are certain improvements we could make. A good example is that the National Highways design standard for a single carriageway road is still one-star. It has four junctions, a 60 mph limit and no protection, so we still have a design standard that is one-star. There is stuff that we should be following, although we will probably have to invent the UK version because we have so many different types of road. So it is not a direct model but it is a guiding principle, shall we say.
Steve Gooding: When we think about other countries, for example Sweden, what we can usefully adopt is a mindset and an approach that designs the interventions to fit the circumstances of the country, the population and the layout of the place. The fact is that the size of the Swedish population and the size of the road network it is dealing with is very different from that of the UK or England. But if you take the same mindset—“Here is what we want to achieve. What are the right interventions for us? How do we best carry them out in, let us just say, a contested environment, where some of the things you are doing mean people not doing what they otherwise would have chosen to do?”—that is what we can pick up. I would pick that up, rather than picking individual elements out of the Swedish approach.
I would just say, though, that of course it has benefited from having a world-leading auto company, which has blazed a trail for many of the vehicle design features, voluntarily, that have come to form the basis of our standards.
Q21 Dr Arthur: That is a cultural thing as well, is it not? In terms of what Sweden does that we do not, and which is not in the strategy, two things caught my eye. Steve, you mentioned alcohol interlocks earlier. In Sweden these are used much more widely, particularly in the commercial sector, but also just for ordinary vehicles. Do you think they have a part to play in the UK?
Steve Cole: Alcohol is a major cause of collisions, and where they have been rolled out, both in the States and in Scandinavia, we have seen that they impact that. The point that my namesake made about going after silver bullets is really important here: they will definitely have a role, and they have been shown to have a role. The extent to which that compensates for lack of police capacity to enforce drink-driving laws, lack of skills among traffic officers and that sort of thing is a different challenge. It would definitely play a part in the reduction of drink-driving. We know a lot of workplace businesses are looking at them at the moment as well.
As I mentioned earlier, we work in the GCC and we do quite a lot of work with the Omani Government around that. They have no issues whatsoever with drink-driving in that country, but they have massive issues with speed. It is also about culture and behaviour change.
Q22 Dr Arthur: I do not know who is a cyclist on the Committee, but another thing that Sweden has is presumed liability for accidents involving cyclists. Is there space for that in the UK?
Chair: Collisions involving cyclists.
Dr Arthur: Apologies: I was using Steve’s nomenclature.
Chair: Do not use the word “accidents”.
Dr Arthur: I will start again. Should we consider presumed liability for collisions involving cyclists?
Jamie Hassall: Given that the people who are likely to die are the cyclists, they cannot stand up and say, “This is what happened.” So what you rely on is what the driver says, which will often be that they were not at fault: “Oh, I didn’t see them,” or something like that. Having presumed liability leads on to other things, such as dashcams.
If we all had dashcams, it would make the police investigation much easier because they could watch the dashcam and say, “The cyclist did just pull out in front of you—fair enough,” or, “You should have seen that cyclist, and you didn’t take avoiding action.” It would be good, because it would make us start thinking, “I need these things to protect me.” I would say it is a really good idea, because it is the victims that have the smallest voice in this, and it is the person that has killed them who is saying, “They just jumped out in front of me.”
A dashcam is fantastic. I saw an example where a company had an alert that their driver just suddenly braked hard. The report back from the driver was, “Yes, someone just did something, and I did an amazing stop.” When they saw the dashcam footage, a lady had crossed on a pedestrian crossing and he had almost run her over and had had to hit the brake very hard. So they had some training for him to do afterwards, shall we say.
Dr Arthur: Are we all for presumed liability? Excellent. That is a great conclusion.
Nicholas Lyes: I think it is a really difficult thing to put into practice. I certainly take on board what Jamie is saying. We already have a hierarchy of road user, as part of the Government policy where interventions are judged upon a vulnerability of a road user, and that is sensible.
Q23 Dr Arthur: There is a whole debate on that, is there not? Whether that is actually respected, particularly if you are a pedestrian—
Nicholas Lyes: Absolutely, but what we should be focusing on is the investment of infrastructure first. If that means that we are building more cycle lanes and reducing speed limits, that could make a bigger difference than presumed liability. Over the longer term, that will create a cultural shift away from people automatically getting into their cars and on to a bike.
Q24 Dr Arthur: We are lacking in segregated cycle infrastructure just now. Surely that is justification for going to presumed liability, because it is less safe for cyclists to cycle. Other road users should be much more aware of them and careful when they are getting around them, rather than waiting for perfect segregated cycling to be in place, which we have to accept is never going to be perfect enough for some people.
Nicholas Lyes: It is never going to be perfect. But also, why would we necessarily stop at cyclists? Why would we not talk about pedestrians or motorcyclists? You start to get into this round of different road users, then you potentially add the e-scooter users in there. So it would be highly complex, and it is just one of those things where you would need to think about the unintended consequences first.
Ross Moorlock: Just to add to Nick’s point, there is a potential risk of adding to tension between different road users, which actually I do not think would be helpful to the broader ambitions of what we are trying to achieve through the strategy. I speak having been on the wrong end of a road crash—a cycling crash—with a vehicle driver who was not prosecuted for that crash, but should have been, so I have personal experience of this. But families who have been bereaved or seriously injured in road crashes want fair and robust justice. That is the important thing from a post-crash perspective. I do not think assuming liability is necessary for that to be achieved.
Jamie Hassall: It comes down to motonormativity. We all love cars: even if we do not use one, we seem to appreciate them. When there is a serious collision and someone is killed, even if the driver was speeding, whether it was dangerous driving is questioned, even though they were breaking the law. We have this system where we are very forgiving to perpetrators. That is where it comes back to that presumed liability. We need to switch that dial because we are almost too far the other way, and actually it would help to make people realise that they could be held to account for their actions. They could not just say, “Oh, they jumped out in front of me,” because the evidence would be there. It would make the police investigation much easier and would feed nicely into a road safety investigation branch.
Dr Arthur: It is a strange thing, is it not? If a speed trap is set up locally, people share the details on their Facebook page. They are doing criminals out there a favour. You would not do the same for burglars or any other criminals. It is absolutely dreadful.
Jamie Hassall: “My neighbour is away” and that sort of thing, yes.
Q25 Dr Arthur: We have spoken a little about what else the Government should bring to the UK, and about the challenges we might face if we just lift and shift the Swedish approach into the UK. We have spoken about graduated licences in Australia, which we will come back to, and Steve, you raised the alcohol interlocks used in the USA. Are there any other countries we should look at if we are really serious about tackling road safety?
Steve Gooding: Obviously we have talked about the Scandinavian countries, but I would not hold up another country to suggest that we can pick up everything that it is doing and drop it in. There is good practice all over the place, and the important thing is to be always looking and aware if there is a worthwhile intervention that has been developed that looks like it would apply to us and have beneficial effects in our circumstances. Then we should be asking ourselves whether we should apply it and what the evidence is for its success.
You are going to hear us keep harping on about this. The work that we did for the Department for Transport about five years ago looked at the fact that many other countries have road collision investigation branches, or safety investigation branches that encompass road collisions. That is something that exists in the United States and in many other countries. It seems to me to be something that we could very easily pick up and drop into our system and that would work here. I am sure there are other things like that, where we can see why it seems to work and why it would seem to apply to the British context.
Q26 Dr Arthur: There are some investigations already, but are you saying that we should be much more systematic, or perhaps lower the threshold for what would trigger that kind of investigation?
Steve Gooding: At the moment there are the police investigations, which are obviously about blame, not cause. They are very thorough, but it is not the job of the police to be working their way back to why this happened; it is, “Should we be prosecuting somebody?” The purpose of an investigation branch would be looking at why this happened and what, if anything, could be done to prevent it or prevent its severity.
Chair: We already have that in rail and aviation.
Steve Gooding: We have it in maritime, too.
Q27 Chair: The Government have said they will bring it in, but, as you say, what are the resources and what are the terms of reference?
Steve Gooding: Precisely. The intention is to bring in something—I would call it a light-touch version, which we support—that is basically a data-based approach, looking at what patterns we can see. As there are so many crashes every day, not every one of them could be investigated by a central branch, but what patterns of causation we could see that would enable us to target future interventions more carefully.
Dr Arthur: That sounds good.
Steve Cole: Very simple approaches are used in other areas of accident prevention. Outside transport, you have RIDDOR reporting that, if you are injured in the workplace, conducts an investigation into that. Drowning prevention is a really good example as well, particularly in Scotland, where it has looked at post-incident review. One thing that that has created is thinking about the assumptions that you have—you have talked a little about assumptions made on driving behaviour—in drowning. You have an assumption that swimming is the No. 1 way not to drown, when actually it is not: it is being able to float. That only came out of an investigation into the causes of drowning; it was people who were strong swimmers getting cold water shock. Then you will have seen these campaigns by the RNLI, the MCA and things like that.
That is the sort of evidence that we do not get in STATS19 reporting because, as Steve says, we only get the blame—the legal culpability—rather than the causation. Was the driver fatigued? Had they been on the back of a 40-hour shift? Were they on any medication? Those are the sorts of thing.
Jamie Hassall: I mentioned this earlier: I think Victoria in Australia has something called the TAC model, where they get funding that pays for the NHS-type treatment. That is that one, but the other one—partly picking up on what Steve said—is that actually we have some really good systems here; they are just not working as well as they should. We have the coroners’ courts, which can issue prevention of future deaths reports. We say road deaths are all preventable, yet only about 2% of coroners issue a prevention of future deaths report, and they are not always based on the safe system. Looking at our own systems that we have in place, we have a fantastic Health and Safety Executive, which reports that falling from a height is the biggest cause of work-related death. It is not; it is on the road.
If we reported it all in one place, that would be great. I would love to be able to say how many children have been killed by people driving for work. I do not think anyone could answer that question, because we do not keep the data. We do not even know—finger on heart—how many work-related road deaths there are because it is not properly recorded. Having that data all in one place will help focus, and at some point someone might ask whether we need to worry about slips and trips so much, or whether we should actually be worrying about how people die.
Q28 Dr Arthur: We will put the NHS in charge of road safety. I definitely think it should be in charge of gritting pavements in the winter when they are icy—it makes such a difference.
You are right that across the UK we have fantastic policies, right across the realm, but the delivery can be absolutely awful. I am leading up to where we started on the safe system approach; I apologise if this has been answered already. Back in 2015, the Government adopted the safe system approach. If we were to review that—very quickly, because I expect we are getting pressed for time now—how has that been going over the last 11 years? Accepting that we started off saying that it is a long-term thing and we have to have short-term and long-term goals, has it been meaningful, or was it just a fantastic press announcement back in 2015?
Jamie Hassall: Scotland is a really good example. It has a programme of training on the safe system so people understand it. That has been delivered to MSPs as well—it has been done it across a broad range.
Q29 Dr Arthur: Has that not happened in England?
Jamie Hassall: That has not happened in England. Look at National Highways and its design standards: if it fully embraced the safe system approach, it would either change the design of a single carriageway road or drop the speed limit on the current design, but this has not been understood and percolated through the system.
Ross Moorlock: We have to look at what has been in place over the last 10 or 15 years. We have not had a national road safety strategy or national casualty reduction targets. The evidence tells us, particularly in countries such as Sweden, that where the safe system has really delivered impacts is where they have not dipped their toe in; they have been all in.
To come back to the comments made earlier about Vision Zero, it has to be embedded and ingrained in everything, in all decision making and in all discussion around infrastructure—all the five components of the safe system. Over the last decade, we have clearly not done that. I would argue that at best we have dipped our toe in, and not gone much beyond that.
Q30 Dr Arthur: Is there a success we can point to in something that has happened after adopting that in 2015? Or is the cynic in me right that it was a fantastic press release? No doubt there were lots of journalists there and it was in all the newspapers, but then it was quietly forgotten. I am being really cynical, but is there a success we can point to?
Steve Cole: As you are talking about a system, and we have talked about this being a multi-factorial thing, it is very hard to pin down that this one thing has worked.
You could look at ADS in cars; that would be a reasonable example. Automated driving systems have improved a lot. Also, when you look at the decades this strategy has been spread over, you have austerity and lack of investment. You could say it is a dipped toe or that it is safety-washing to a degree, but you can see the divergence between Scotland and Wales and England: the first two countries have safe system strategies, implementation plans, high levels of investment and high levels of ministerial accountability.
We met the Scottish Transport Minister because one of her team had called her on a mobile from a car. She had hung up on them immediately—investigation. Not blame culture, but “How does anyone think this is doable? This is against all the policy.” There is that big leadership piece it has had as well. That is the other consistency piece: that it has been quite a rotating post. And if you look at things like policing capacity, we have 1,100 fewer traffic officers in England, so the enforcement part is going to be difficult.
Q31 Chair: Are there any examples of countries that have had a fairly all-encompassing approach—safe systems or something else—that has not worked? In which case, are there lessons? Even if now the Government have a commitment to a fairly broad strategy, are there any countries about which we need to say, “Hang on a minute: just make sure we don’t make the mistake it made”?
Jamie Hassall: Scotland had a slow start.
Chair: Do you mean that you have to be realistic?
Jamie Hassall: You have to be realistic, sort of thing. It embraced it, but it was a slow start. But we are now seeing benefits and reductions coming through, so you have to bear that in mind as well.
Steve Gooding: I certainly could not point to another country that has adopted it where it has not worked and we could then work out why. If you look around European countries particularly, you can see a pattern where road safety becomes an issue of national concern—an issue for the Prime Minister or the President. We saw that in France and, back in the day, in Germany. It is then on a downward trajectory and gets to a certain point where other things take over at the national priority level, and things get in the way. For example, if I hark back to 2015, the best of intentions were there in some of the individual commitments. After all—we keep mentioning it—the previous Government committed to implement a road safety investigation branch, and then all of a sudden did not because other things were in the way. When other pressures come along, is that focus maintained? As others have said, is it embedded in such a way that, for example, the combined authority strategies in particular conurbations have improving the safety of citizens, including on the road, as part of their overall approach?
Chair: Since 2015, in London, in parts of other cities and in Wales, 20 mph has become much more normalised. That is in the last 10, 11 or 12 years.
Steve Gooding: We have seen a lot of engineering design changes, with prioritisation for cycling and public transport services. A lot has happened that has had safety in there, but has not always been purely for a safety purpose.
Chair: We need to move on, but Laurence has a quick question.
Q32 Laurence Turner: Mr Cole, you mentioned RIDDOR reporting. My understanding is that most injuries sustained on the public highways are not reportable under RIDDOR. Do you think that work-related road injuries should come under the RIDDOR system, even before any wider system is put in place?
Steve Cole: That is a good question, Laurence. Yes, we do. We have had this conversation with a number of Ministers. The challenge is scale. We know that HSE is under pressure; a lot of organisations have had reductions in financing and staffing, and we have seen the trouble it had in bringing the Building Safety Regulator into HSE. It would open up a lot of investigations and a lot of incidents, but ultimately we think it should be in there, and we are not alone. We deal with a lot of businesses that have fleets driving for work and are heavily involved in managing occupational road risk, and they too are concerned about this, in terms of the financial impact and the impact of increasing environmental sustainability governance controls. I was at an event in Scotland three weeks ago for a road risk-based mock trial, and 150 businesses attended because of these concerns. We do think it should sit in there. It is the most dangerous work-based activity, but again, resourcing becomes the challenge.
Jamie Hassall: Just as an example, a concrete lorry could plough through a family of three and kill them all and it would not be RIDDOR-reportable; however, if it spilled some concrete, it would be RIDDOR-reportable. That does not make sense.
Chair: It does not. Alex, we will move on to governance.
Q33 Alex Mayer: Obviously, road safety covers many different aspects of policy. This is a document written by the Department for Transport, but we have already talked about how it impacts on health, policing and so on. In the Secretary of State’s introduction, she says, “This strategy rests on partnership.” She is not particularly talking about all the different Government Departments; she is talking more about local government and mayors. Is there a danger that this could become a bit of a muddle, where nobody knows who is in charge of doing what?
Jamie Hassall: It comes back to the delivery plan. If people know what they are meant to be doing, they will get on with it. In the road safety community, we have come together and produced a consensus statement; we are ready to get involved and help, but at the moment it is not clear who is doing what. National Highways is not going to do a lot, because it has a very low target. We know that local authorities are being encouraged to have more demanding targets locally. But yes, there needs to be a delivery plan stating who should be doing what.
Coming back to the point on RIDDOR, companies should be doing more, and making work-related road traffic collisions RIDDOR-reportable would be a good start.
Nicholas Lyes: Partnerships could be extremely beneficial in this. Within the strategy they are talking about a road safety board, with a panel that sits underneath it reporting to Ministers and advising Ministers and agencies. My expertise at IAM RoadSmart is more about driving and riding standards, but it is important to have an infrastructure expert when dealing with safe systems; for example, I could not tell you exactly what type of central reservation barrier is more conducive to a lorry crash. You need expertise from different partnerships, including the police from an enforcement and investigation point of view.
Ross Moorlock: Partnerships will be key. As Jamie mentioned, the detail of that delivery plan and what it looks like needs to be shared very quickly now, to start the process of joining all this together. It is going to take some time to do that. Steve mentioned the road safety investigation branch; I believe that will play a fundamental part in connecting all this up. But we have to connect the top governance board with what is happening regionally and what is happening on the ground, what is being delivered and what is not, and make sure it is all connected up. That is going to be key.
Q34 Alex Mayer: Steve, in your evidence you suggested that there was a danger that momentum could be lost while this was being set up. Did you want to make any comments on that or anything else?
Steve Gooding: There is a danger, and that danger is still with us. From the opening remarks that my colleagues on this panel have made, we need a bit of a reinvigoration. I am aware that the ministerially chaired project board is going to meet later this month; I do not know exactly who is on it, but it is in their diaries. I absolutely agree with the point that, when you are trying to run complicated programmes, there is nothing quite like knowing who is supposed to do what by when. If you do not know that, muddle is going to happen.
When it comes to who is doing what—for example in the city of Birmingham or the west midlands conurbation—there is an interesting point that the Committee might want to pursue. Is it better for the national Government to say, “Right, Mayor of West Midlands: we are all going to do this and you are going to do it as well,” or, “We are going to support you, Mayor of Birmingham, and as part of that we are expecting certain things to happen that we regard as very important, such as not killing people on your roads.” Getting that balance right can be tricky, but I do not think it is unachievable. There are already forums where, for example, the metro mayors get together.
Maybe this should be a standing item, where someone from the Department for Transport, ministerial or otherwise, has a watching brief to make sure that when the local authorities and devolved Administrations are looking to national Government for something, they know when it is coming. The national Government know what they have to do to support the rest; it is about money, but it is also about powers, and about the many and various guidance documents that have been promised.
Q35 Olly Glover: At the moment, YouTube is feeding me clips from “The Thick of It”. That is not the only programme where there are big debates about whether something is a strategy or a plan and so on, and of course we have to endure such things in the corporate environment. But given that this is a strategy rather than a plan, do you feel there should be a separate plan for delivering the measures in it? Are you satisfied that there are sufficient resources available and that they are going to be dedicated to ensuring that any plan delivers the measures in the strategy?
Steve Cole: I was head of strategy for a very large organisation for a while, so I spent a lot of time on these semantic debates. Yes, you need a delivery plan. That is key, especially because a lot of the strategy is locked. This is evidence-based, we know what the evidence is, so let us get on and do it. Funding then becomes incredibly important; what are the clear funding routes? We know that there needs to be increased investment in some areas. The strategic objectives in the plan would lead you to believe that they are calling for additional investment. We would need to see additional investment in those areas, and that should be prioritised through any implementation plan. Importantly, as has just been said by my namesake, if you do not have dates and you do not have names, things do not get done.
Jamie Hassall: I would say that you need plans within plans. If you are talking about drink-driving, for instance, you need a plan and a strategy within that as well. The other thing we can do is to celebrate success. MOD research has shown that road traffic collisions are the main cause of death for service personnel. It now has a road safety strategy of its own; that was really nice. In 2020, the police also did some work showing that road traffic collisions were the main cause of death for police officers, but I have not seen a strategy for that. I think it relates mainly to fatigue while driving home. It is great that they know about it, but you want them to take the next step.
I have sent FOIs to the NHS asking how many doctors and nurses have been killed in a road traffic collision; I believe it is probably one of the biggest killers. The data was not held centrally, so I have not been sent all that information. The Government need to lead by example in their Departments to say either, “We don’t have a problem,” or, “We have a problem, and this is what we’re doing about it and how we’re joining up with others.” I would say you need a lot of plans in order to deliver something.
Q36 Chair: We are slightly pushed for time, given how many more questions and issues we want to cover. Steve Gooding, your evidence said that the strategy is “long on consultations and investigations but light on milestones.” What would a productive set of milestones look like?
Steve Gooding: To build on the answers we have been giving to Mr Glover, several of us have said to folk in the DFT that, at the point at which it convenes the advisory panel, any of us finding ourselves on that would want to see a plan that had names and dates for when things were going to happen. Perhaps the most difficult set of dates to pin down would be for those things that need statutory provision; none were in the King’s Speech, so we may necessarily be talking about a future parliamentary Session. But there are some other things we have talked about, such as the production of guidance on the setting of speed limits, which can be given a timescale, if only by season. It should not be beyond the wit of clever people to say, “Our expectation is that this one will be produced in autumn 2026 or spring 2027.” It does not have to be absolutely everything, but it has to be enough to give a sense that things are coming on at pace.
Q37 Mrs Blundell: As you will know, the road safety strategy announced a number of consultations, which have recently closed, on specific policies such as motoring offences, introducing a minimum learning period for learner drivers, introducing mandatory eyesight testing for older drivers, improving moped and motorcycle training, and mandating vehicle safety technologies. We have already touched on these topics; it is fair to say that there is some impatience in this country when it comes to consultations.
We also heard from the National Fire Chiefs’ Council, which has stated in its evidence: “Many of the announcements within the strategy are in fact public consultations on proposals where there has been consensus among road safety organisations (supported by academic evidence) for at least a decade.” Do we already have strong enough evidence on any of these consultation areas to take action now, rather than waiting for the Government to respond to the consultations? I will go to Ross first.
Ross Moorlock: The answer is yes. As you have alluded to, there is a lot of evidence in support of many of the areas that have been consulted on. Vehicle technology and the general safety regulations is a great example; I am confident that this will be introduced and implemented, but it should have been introduced many years ago and it certainly could have been introduced in the last 18 months. Another area is the reduction in drink-drive limits and consultations in relation to young drivers, where again the evidence base is incredibly strong. As we have touched on already across the panel, there is evidence to suggest that the measures could have gone further. There would have been a lot of support within the road safety sector had decisions been made to implement and go further in some areas that have been consulted on.
Q38 Mrs Blundell: Would others agree that there is a risk of consulting too much on matters where we already have a strong sense of public opinion, or sufficient evidence? Steve, do you have a different view?
Steve Gooding: The five consultations that came out alongside the strategy were mostly asking, by implication, not “Shall we do this?”, but “How shall we do this?” That question is important in getting the statute right. Let us take, for example, eyesight testing for older drivers. I feel a personal interest in this; I did not use to think about it, but now it is very much on my mind. There are some very sensible questions being posed, including by the optometry profession, as to what the requirements for testing should be. In defence of these consultations, there are some things that need to be investigated in order to get the statute right. However, let us not spend the next six to 12 months thinking about the responses; I suspect the responses, certainly from people on this panel, will have been universally positive.
Mrs Blundell: Obviously, that might make it more difficult to achieve the broader ambitions of the strategy within the time frame suggested.
Nicholas Lyes: Everyone on this panel will probably want to say, “Let’s just get on with it,” because there is that consensus. The only note of caution is that sometimes policies can have unintended consequences, and it is important to hear about them. For example, when we talk about all-lane running smart motorways, the Government policy is that they will build no more. That is fine; I do not like them and I know that a lot of drivers do not like them, but in consequence there will be more congestion on the strategic road network, and in turn more people will use rural roads. That is just an example. A process of consultation on the policy and how you implement it is important.
Steve Cole: My concern would be capacity. There are other things that are not being consulted on that we know can be done at speed now. Will that volume of consultations meet the capacity within the DFT to operationalise those things quickly?
Q39 Chair: In most policy areas, Governments want to change policy, but there is often a divergence of opinion among the stakeholders responding to a consultation, and the Government then land somewhere in the middle. I would have thought that there is no real disagreement with the idea that we need to do something about road safety, so if it is not other stakeholders, what is slowing things down? Is it, as Steve Gooding said earlier, that Governments move on to other things and it stops being a priority, or is it all getting bogged down in differences of opinion over detail? What would be needed rather than more consultations? If those are not the answer, what is the answer to keep the momentum going, given that there are different stakeholders with different but not necessarily opposing interests?
Steve Gooding: It is probably worth distinguishing between the things that will require statute and the rest. As I said earlier, if we had a delivery plan, I would expect it to be showing as early wins the things that do not need statute, with the things that need statute further down the track.
One of the problems we have in this country is that so much is tied up in primary legislation, including things like driver testing. The motorcycling consultation is pretty much a repeat of one that was held seven years ago with all the same measures in it. We said yes then, and we are saying yes again now, but implementing it means finding parliamentary time. It would be really helpful to have a legislative vehicle that could take some details out of primary legislation and put them into secondary, so that things can be updated or refined as and when they should be. For instance, how exactly do you carry out eyesight testing? How should a driving test be conducted? These things do not need to be prescribed in detail in a Bill; they should be a matter for secondary legislation.
Steve Cole: That is a very good point. I am sure you will all have been engaged in the PRAM Bill for some time, which uses a similar mechanism around primary legislation to enable other areas to be moved up. You are right, Steve, that one of the blockers is the lack of a sufficient piece of enabling primary legislation to allow Parliament to make amendments and changes relatively simply within a longer-term framework.
The other point is that a number of areas around road safety lend themselves to a culture wars debate. MPs who are concerned about the safety of their seats in the next election have a perception, not unreasonably, that something might be unpopular or that it might land them on the front page of the Daily Mail. You only have to see the reaction to some measures, particularly regarding eyesight and speed limits. That is at the back of people’s minds.
Chair: Every time anyone acts in those sorts of ways, I just channel Barbara Castle. Laurence, let us turn to professional drivers and riders.
Q40 Laurence Turner: I should draw attention to the register of interests and the fact that I am a member of the GMB and Unite trade unions. In the road safety strategy, the Government announced that they would be piloting a work-related road safety charter. Do you think that a voluntary approach is the best way forward? What examples should the Government be drawing on during this period of, I think, two years, to make this trial charter as effective as possible?
Jamie Hassall: The Government have said that if this does not work, they would consider legislation—but we already have legislation through the Health and Safety Act, which says that you should do what is “reasonably practicable”. That is not happening, and it is why there is a RIDDOR consultation at the moment. We are encouraging people to respond and say that work-related road collisions, especially KSI, should be included. It is a good idea and it will raise awareness, but the important thing is what will sit underneath it. For instance, oil and gas have an industry standard; rail is another good example. If someone is caught with alcohol in their system on the rail, they do not work in rail again. They will go and work on road. If you are a lorry driver and you fail an alcohol test, your employer might sack you, but you will just go and get another job. So yes, it has merit, but most important is what is going to sit underneath it.
Steve Gooding: I do not think we would say it was a sufficient condition; it is probably worthwhile. As I said earlier, it depends very much on what is in it, but having devised one, it strikes me that there are levers the Government can pull. For example, no Government contract should be awarded to a company that does not adopt the charter. No Government Department should be exempt from implementing the charter. If the charter deals with things like fatigue, and with the expectations of members of staff who have to drive in the course of work, then the Government should be leading by example, both in themselves and in the contracts and companies they deal with. That would capture quite a large segment of the economy.
Ross Moorlock: We support the charter in the absence of the RIDDOR piece, which actually is where we should be going with this. I agree about having those levers in place to force people to sign up and adhere to what is within the charter. The procurement piece is a really important lever. There is a risk that if this is voluntary, and there are no levers to encourage or incentivise organisations to join, we will end up with organisations that are already prioritising work-related road risk and doing good stuff, while those organisations that do not even have this on their risk register remain where they are. That is going to be important.
Q41 Laurence Turner: The Manchester and London voluntary charters, from which the Government seem to have taken some inspiration, are quite heavily focused on delivery drivers. On my local high street, new safety issues have arisen from heavier bike vehicles that are modified to go faster than they should. What specific issues around delivery drivers do you think the charter should cover, and have you seen any evidence about the effectiveness of the London and Manchester charters?
Nicholas Lyes: It is about accountability, to a certain degree. I have to be careful how I say this, but we have a gig economy in this country that is effectively unregulated. There are people who are going out on illegally owned private e-scooters doing work for organisations that should otherwise know better, but because of employment laws, there is not a great deal that can be done about it.
When it comes to the charter itself, I am of the view that you need the Government to put forward a minimum standard. I would also say that there are plenty of organisations out there—including ourselves—that would be more than happy to be a part of this and to work on an accreditation scheme that encourages better practice among fleet operators. You have to look at the likes of the FORS; that tends to work pretty well. But there is more that can be done.
Q42 Laurence Turner: You mentioned willingness to participate. Have you had an approach from the DFT about participation in drawing up the work-related road safety charter?
Nicholas Lyes: Yes, we have been talking to the DFT about that.
Steve Cole: I completely agree with what Nicholas was saying about the risk of e-scooters. They are a massive fire risk when modded, so they fall into a lot of other areas of safety as well.
Chair: That relates to fake e-bikes too.
Steve Cole: Every local authority in the country has now had at least one lithium-ion battery fire, and we are seeing increased risk around that. It is feeding a problem that already exists.
The other point I would make on managing occupational road risk and partnerships to be slightly more on the side of individual involvement is that the Scottish Government have run a really strong programme called the Scottish Occupational Road Safety Alliance. It is just guidance, tools and best practice networking for a range of organisations that are interested in that space. There are now about 1,300 corporate organisations involved; it has worked well for a fairly low investment from the Government and could easily be replicated by combined authorities in partnership with the chambers or other organisations. I agree that you will not get the bottom out of the market, but you will raise the middle, and that is really important.
Q43 Mrs Blundell: Following on from my colleague’s question about light goods vehicles and delivery vehicles, we know that the HGV sector, which plays a significant role in our national economy, already faces substantial issues around safety. Does anyone have any thoughts on whether we need to see legislative changes in this space around the risk of HGVs to other road users?
Jamie Hassall: We are doing some work with National Rail looking at the difference in risk of travelling freight by rail, compared with road; it is at least 17 times safer, and it might be nearer 100 times. Companies such as Tesco and Eddie Stobart have moved more on to rail, but other companies are moving away from it.
In terms of the Health and Safety Act, companies are not doing what is reasonably practicable. First, companies should be considering how to carry out their operation safely. Secondly, we now have five-star trucks, but what is the encouragement for companies to buy a five-star truck? If they are operating in London and they do not have a five-star truck, they are at risk because they know that there are cyclists and pedestrians and all these issues.
Q44 Chair: Am I right that in London they are required to have five-star trucks?
Jamie Hassall: No; they are required to have the Vision Zero, which is a start, but it is not necessarily the whole picture. Companies should understand what vehicles they have, when they can safely use them and how—if they do not have these safer vehicles—they can mitigate risk in a different way. If you go back further in time, someone would be walking in front of them with a red flag. If you cannot safely navigate around London, you should not go into London.
When there is a fatal collision, the driver is blamed, not the company that gave him that vehicle that might not have had those safety features and said, “Go and deliver this—we’re not going to tell you which route to take.” Companies need to take more responsibility.
Steve Cole: You would be taking responsibility if this were a construction site. That is the relevant comparison, and if you were found to have not—
Jamie Hassall: Once you were on it.
Steve Cole: Exactly. If that same vehicle is on a construction site, there is a totally different set of accountabilities, a totally different set of legislation and a totally different apportionment of blame. It becomes a corporate issue, rather than an individual driver issue.
Chair: We have been to HS2 sites; the minute you cross into the site, you are aware of a massive safety culture, which is not there out on the street. Obviously, that does not apply just to lorries, but they are a major risk.
Steve Gooding: One thing that could be looked at is the level of penalties, particularly for drivers’ hours contraventions. We are aware that the level of penalty is arguably not high enough, but it is a particular issue if the DVSA is pulling over drivers from foreign-registered vehicles. The penalties are clearly not sufficient and cannot be sufficiently applied to be a deterrent from breaking our current rules.
Chair: We have gone into the sub-topic of the gig economy. I draw people’s attention to the APPG cycling and walking report; I was on the panel, and it picked up a lot of this.
Q45 Dr Arthur: I want to return to the gig economy aspect of the work-related road safety charter. Steve, you said that it would have an impact on the middle and top of the market, but that the bottom of the market would be harder to shift. When I think of the gig economy, it is the bottom of the market that is the problem; you have parcel and food delivery companies which, at the heart of it, are exploiting these workers. That is part of their business model, and they are making lots of money out of it. These companies know there are issues; they know that, right across the country, the police and local authorities are getting complaints, but they are not acting on them because of their business model. How is a voluntary charter going to change that?
Steve Cole: I was referring to occupational road safety and the round-robin gig economy as a whole.
Chair: There are other jurisdictions that have brought in a change of law and have stopped the gig economy, exploitation and subsequent fake e-bike problems, so it can be done by legislation or regulation.
Jamie Hassall: There are fundamental changes to working regulations that need to be made to address the gig economy. We can compare this to when we used to buy coal from countries that got kids to dig it out. Eventually it became too embarrassing; we had to deal with it and stop buying it. It is the same with the gig economy. If we want pizza delivered cheaply, it is the best option, but at a certain point we have to take responsibility and say, “This company is making money on this.” It is cheaper for workers to get a high-powered electric bike than a motorbike because they would need insurance and tax and all those things. But even when they do ride a compliant vehicle, they are probably using it on an L-plate. They have very little training, and there is a box on the back that adds extra weight.
Chair: There is quite a lot of evidence about this. It is also about the fact that it is too easy to pass on your bike to someone else, and the delivery company—the app—does not know who is riding the bike. We will turn to Alex, who has a question on fires.
Q46 Alex Mayer: I should declare an interest as the chair of the APPG for micromobility. You alluded to lithium batteries causing fires.
Chair: Not all of them.
Alex Mayer: Exactly. Would you agree that there is a difference between bikes and scooters that have been retrofitted with conversion kits, or that might have been imported illegally, and the ones that are being used in trials, which are much more robust from a fire safety point of view?
Steve Cole: That is another nice question. The answer is yes.
Alex Mayer: I feel we might have upset the whole sector there.
Steve Cole: We are definitely trying not to upset the whole sector.
Chair: On the APPG, we are trying to use terms such as “fake” or “illegally modified” e-bikes.
Steve Cole: Micromobility schemes are completely separate; they have separate regulation and a separate structure. You are talking about e-bikes.
Chair: It has been very useful to bring the workplace element into this discussion. Let us move on to young and novice drivers.
Q47 Jacob Collier: We have already touched on this briefly. The Government are consulting on a three or six-month minimum learning period for learner drivers. Separately, we are looking at driving test wait times; it could be that the Government are inadvertently hitting that target already because people are waiting so long. How much real-world difference do you think it would make to have a minimum three-month or six-month learning period, and do you have any preference as to which one might be best?
Jamie Hassall: My daughter is currently learning to drive, and she has to wait six months to get a test. The Government are probably saying they want to reduce that to seven weeks, but if we are consulting on this, is it not counterintuitive? As it is taking about six months anyhow, my guess is that it will not make any difference. If you make it longer, it might. Or you could mandate what they have to learn in that period; otherwise, people might say, “I have my provisional, I’ll do nothing until the last month, then I’ll learn and take it.” What is perhaps more important within that learning period is what is included. What experience do we want people to have? I would say six months would be the minimum, and I would like to see longer, if possible.
Nicholas Lyes: I agree—we want it to be longer—but I also agree that this is about what is learned at particular stages of the process. A lot of young people will pass their test and have no experience of driving at night, particularly if they have learned to drive in the summer, or they will not know what it is like to drive if there is snow on the road. All these things make a difference. I am not saying we can manufacture snow for practice; people might have concerns about the use of skid pans, for example. But we have to look at the itinerary of people’s learning, and if it does not cover all the bases, frankly they are not ready to go on the road on their own.
Steve Gooding: Having a syllabus is part of the proposal. I echo what colleagues have said: six months is better than not doing anything, but I do not think it is going to change the world. Within those six months, there should be a syllabus so that the learner driver is required to cover certain aspects of driving in that time. At the very least, we would strongly encourage the view that these are the things you should seek to experience in order to become a safe and competent driver. We strongly support that aspect of it.
Ross Moorlock: One important point that is often neglected in relation to young driver crashes is that 50% of people killed or seriously injured in crashes involving young drivers are other road users. That was not specifically referred to anywhere within the strategy, and it is a statistic that is often left out of the debate. This is not just something that affects young drivers; it affects all road users, and that is a really important element when we are looking at measures to strengthen licensing.
Steve Cole: Their passengers can obviously be of varying age. Putting facetious points about timing aside, this is about reducing the risk faced by the young drivers when they start driving rather than postponing it. At the moment, what we have with the delays is postponement rather than increased skill. The part that is also missing is that the highest risk period is not during your supervised learning; it is day one, when you go out after passing your test. That is where the other big gap sits.
Q48 Jacob Collier: Scott is going to touch on graduated driving licences, but do you see any potential risks or drawbacks for young people and their access to education or work? When I was growing up, I needed a car to be able to get to my job.
Nicholas Lyes: I would flip that and say that actually if you are better skilled in the run-up to passing your test and have a better culture of responsibility once you have passed that test, that will benefit you more once you are in the workplace, so I would try to see it from the other point of view.
Q49 Dr Arthur: Steve, has the syllabus not always existed? You knew what was going to be in the test, and that is what you learned, so is this not a distraction?
Steve Gooding: I do not think it is a distraction; it is about setting clearer expectations. You are right that the Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency has had versions of this in the past. I do not think that there is any harm in revisiting and refreshing these things from time to time, just to keep them relevant. After all, the vehicles and technology have almost certainly changed since the last time it was revised. Being able to cope with advanced driver systems, those wretched touchscreens and the like is probably a good thing.
Dr Arthur: I used to be a lecturer before I came here, and by and large my students were not interested in learning things that were not in the exam. It used to annoy me, but that is the real world. I apologise for my cynicism.
Steve Gooding: It is a long time since I was a student, but I would say your cynicism is well-founded. As a panel, we are mildly drawn to regulatory answers rather than voluntary answers on this and all other things. Some of us have been involved in producing guidance for parents and guardians, who are often bankrolling this exercise. It is about setting expectations: if the person paying for the lessons, paying for the test and paying for insurance also has a clear checklist to say, “Have you learned how to do this yet?”, it is going to help.
Q50 Dr Arthur: Is the minimum learning period a bit of a fudge? Should we have just gone for a graduated driving licence?
Ross Moorlock: Yes.
Chair: That is what we need: quick answers.
Jamie Hassall: The evidence would support that.
Q51 Dr Arthur: Is there a model we should have looked to? People talk about Australia, but is there anywhere else? If we are going to have a graduated driving licence, is that the model?
Chair: Somewhere that is actually making a difference.
Steve Gooding: I would obviously say that you should look to the model we published a couple of years ago, which is not the same as everywhere else in the world. Everywhere else has subtly different bits and pieces, but we have to recognise the art of the political and practically possible here and therefore look at things that will make the most difference. One is whether the newly qualified driver has other young people in the vehicle with them. That is something to look at. What is the penalty if they take other young people with them? Our preference was to go with a model that focused on that. The basic core minimum of a graduated driver learning system that would work would be six months’ minimum learning and six months of not carrying peer-aged passengers if the driver is aged 17 to 19. One could have something far more extensive that would probably have a greater impact, but it would be resisted more. We think that such a core model could potentially deliver something in the region of 40 lives saved a year.
Q52 Dr Arthur: Incredible. All that sounds like good common sense, of course, but I guess it was evidence-based. You are saying that there is evidence that this approach to graduated driver licensing and the things around it will work, and that it would be better than the minimum learning period.
Steve Gooding: Graduated driver licensing is a term that covers quite a range of approaches. We would all probably say that the minimum learning period is part of that; we could debate whether it should be three, six, or 12 months, but we would like to see minimum requirements for the driver to experience in that time. After that, the question is for how long there should be a restriction after passing the practical test. That is also up for debate. We have suggested six months, but it is hard to definitively say, “The evidence makes it clear that it should be this many months and this many restrictions.” We were looking for the minimum that would deliver a worthwhile result.
Chair: We are only just over halfway through the questions, and we are well over halfway through the time available, so we will move on to the other end of the spectrum: older drivers.
Dr Arthur: We think graduated driving licences should apply to all ages, not just young people.
Q53 Chair: Do you mean novice drivers who have passed their test later in life? Does the evidence suggest that is necessary, or are young drivers the main risk factor?
Dr Arthur: You might have to declare a conflict of interest when answering this.
Jamie Hassall: Brains develop at certain rates. Once people hit 24, they become much more responsible and less likely to take risks, but experience is still needed. It could be that older drivers have a slightly different package, but younger drivers are not wired the same, so they are definitely a higher risk.
Chair: For women the age is 18, and for men it is 24.
Jamie Hassall: Yes, but we are not allowed to differentiate, apparently.
Q54 Dr Arthur: If we are concerned about older drivers, is an eye test the right place to start, and is 70 the right place to set it?
Steve Gooding: Could I split the question in two there? We think it is crazy that the eye test is not a standard requirement regardless. Perhaps I would say this, being on this panel, but 70 is a bit of a red herring. We should have a requirement for an eye test, and it should at the very minimum be part of the 10-year renewal of the licence. Simply reading a number plate across the room is nowhere near good enough in the modern world; there should definitely be an eyesight test requirement, and it should not be limited to a certain age. There are other questions about how we maintain ourselves as safe drivers as we get older. One is eyesight; we are well aware that eyesight tends to deteriorate. As with the rate at which our brains develop, the rate at which we physically deteriorate depends on who we are, how fit we are and so on. That is fairly obvious, but there are other things we can do to help older drivers be safe.
Q55 Chair: Like what?
Nicholas Lyes: There is the physical aspect, such as eyesight, and there is the cognitive aspect as well, but the other factor is confidence. We tend to find that older drivers start to decline in confidence. They become a bit more hesitant, although that is not necessarily a sign of cognitive decline.
Q56 Chair: What measures would you put in place in that respect?
Nicholas Lyes: I certainly agree with what Steve has said about mandatory eye tests. The development of a cognitive test—I cannot recall what the Government are calling it—is a positive step forward as well. We need to be encouraging people to take up things such as mature driver reviews; that is really important to help older drivers with their confidence and their driving abilities post 70.
Q57 Dr Arthur: Would you encourage take-up, rather than making that mandatory?
Nicholas Lyes: You could make it mandatory, but the problem with doing that at a particular age goes back to what Steve said. Some drivers aged 70 are really, really good, and some are not so good. At that point, I am not sure if it is an age-related issue when it comes to driving competency.
Q58 Dr Arthur: Coming back to the cultural point that was raised earlier around how we approach driving, age is in there as well. We have all heard people talking about older drivers and occasionally joking about the behaviours they see, but we almost accept it. I am trying to delicately move on to cognitive testing; is it the right thing to do? Are the Government approaching it in the right way, and should we be concerned about independence in this context? I know a lot of older people, particularly in my church, have to move house when they give up their car because they want to get closer to a public transport route. It is a big decision.
Steve Cole: From an overall macro perspective, the risk is really high that you will kill yourself, kill your passengers or kill other road users. It is a very difficult trade-off that you are phrasing there because, at the same time, giving up driving is a life-changing event. It may also be about insufficient infrastructure in rural areas, wealth inequality and all those things. We know cars are more important if you have a lower-income background. That trade-off is significant, but cognitive testing is a step we would like to get to. Our view is that eyesight tests at 70 are a nice first step, but you need to look more in depth than that; you need to look at the cognitive side as well. To Nicholas’s point about encouraging people to do more advanced driver training or later-life training, that is a really useful thing, but I do not think it can be mandatory.
Q59 Chair: I know that we are behind the curve with eyesight testing by age. Are there other countries that bring in cognitive or other tests for older drivers?
Steve Gooding: There are, but I cannot name any.
Steve Cole: With regard to eyesight, yes, there definitely are.
Chair: The evidence is definitely there for eyesight.
Steve Gooding: The most extreme example we have looked at is Japan; the Committee might like to look at what it has done. Interestingly, it has quite an extensive programme, and not just for cognitive retesting, but it does not appear to have had a tremendously beneficial impact. You have to go through a lot of hoops in Japan to retain your licence.
Dr Arthur: Of course I agree that the Committee should go to Japan to look carefully at how that testing works. That is a great suggestion.
Q60 Laurence Turner: I have a quick question on cognitive testing. This is obviously a sensitive area, so where would the capacity be to carry out the testing? GPs could not do it. Practically, which bodies could administer such tests?
Jamie Hassall: There are already organisations out there at the moment that do work-related health testing, although mainly around health rather than mental capacity. There are tests on reaction times and things like that; perhaps we should have a minimum standard. I would say that keeping people healthy longer is key to a lot of this, because things like diabetes affect sight, nerve endings and so on. There is a big health issue, in that if we can keep people healthy for longer, they can drive safely for longer.
Q61 Laurence Turner: Would you say it is likely that either drivers would need to be charged or some form of Government funding would be needed to create capacity with those third-party organisations?
Jamie Hassall: There are potential savings through insurance. Insurance starts high when you are young, and when you are old it goes up again. It could be that if your insurance company knows you are fit, healthy and have passed all the tests, you can have cheaper insurance. There are potential savings in there, or it could be part of the insurance package that to insure someone you have to make sure that they are healthy and fit to drive.
Dr Arthur: The tests themselves are incredibly simple, and I do not doubt that they could be coupled with the optician’s eye test at 70, at least as a starting point for referral. There is a campaigner in Edinburgh who talks about it quite often.
Q62 Olly Glover: We have covered some of this in the discussion already, so perhaps you could add to the thoughts you have already expressed. Do you feel the strategy sets out enough new measures to improve protection for pedestrians and cyclists?
Jamie Hassall: The simple answer is no.
Nicholas Lyes: No, and I would add motorcyclists to that list as well.
Chair: If you desperately want to add anything, you have the opportunity to send it in to us. We will turn now to the very big subject of approaches to speed.
Q63 Dr Arthur: What changes would you like to see in setting local speed limits?
Jamie Hassall: At the moment, it is done piecemeal. Wales has gone down to 20 mph, and half of London is now the same. It is expensive, you have to sign it, and if you are in a rural setting you end up putting signs in hedges that then get grown over so that you cannot see them. Rather than taking the expensive option of lowering speed in certain areas, a much cheaper way is to say, “Let’s mandate everywhere as 20 mph, and give the local authority the ability to move sections up if they want to.” About 80% of roads are C or U class, but our national speed limit is 60 mph. So why do we not have a limit that is suitable for those roads, and signpost the other 20%? It makes a lot more sense, and it would be a lot cheaper. Having guidance that allows people to change the current signage is more expensive and is going to take more time. You want a national approach that covers the majority and allows local decisions to increase it. I would say that that is the more sensible way forward.
Q64 Dr Arthur: If speed is a big contributor to accident statistics, can we really have a national target for reducing KSIs but leave certain speed limits to people at the local level?
Jamie Hassall: It is not a safe system, and the Government have said they want a safe system.
Ross Moorlock: It is an omission that needs to be corrected. A national approach to speed management, particularly with the ambition and bold nature of the targets, is necessary and is needed.
Chair: The biggest factor is speed.
Dr Arthur: One of the complaints I get a lot in Edinburgh when people are moving around is that the speed limit changes too much—but if you think about people who are driving across the country, and you have different contexts for setting speeds, it can surprise you sometimes.
Chair: I think the point is to have consistency through default.
Steve Cole: We co-run Road Safety Wales with the Welsh Government, so we were very involved in the public intervention side of the 20 mph roll-out. Interestingly, the early findings are that these population-level interventions work, but the learning was about public engagement, education, and the tempo and the nature of the reveal; the really significant pushback has come from that side of it. It is definitely a challenge, but it has to have sufficient resourcing. It is much more resource-intensive than just changing the signs and informing the local authority. It needs a huge public information campaign, a huge amount of engagement and that old-fashioned framing about who is protected by this. Everyone understands the need for 20 mph limits outside schools and in school streets; everyone gets that, but they do not think about the rest of the journey that child is taking from home to school. That messaging lands.
Q65 Olly Glover: We covered 20 mph limits earlier, so just for clarity, and to make sure I have understood what you have said, what does the early evidence from Wales suggest about the impact of introducing default 20 mph limits? I think I heard earlier that it has had a clear benefit.
Steve Cole: There has been a reduction of 11.8% on total casualties and 26.6% on areas that changed from 30 mph to 20 mph. It is only year one, so there is that caveat, but the early signs are very promising.
Jamie Hassall: That is with poor compliance. Average speed has only dropped by about 2.5 mph—
Steve Cole: It is 3.8 mph.
Jamie Hassall: So if compliance improves, you will still see increased benefits.
Dr Arthur: In Edinburgh, we have a 20 mph limit.
Chair: Sorry, but we are really tight on time. We need to be asking brief questions and giving brief answers.
Q66 Dr Arthur: Apologies; it is all interesting. In terms of vehicle technology, are we taking enough advantage? Earlier we were talking about driver assistance systems. Do we think enough about the maintenance of these systems, particularly when vehicles are getting repaired?
Nicholas Lyes: The short answer is no. Our cars are the safest that they have ever been, yet we are not seeing that translate into a reduction in serious casualties. As I said earlier, there is something that is not quite adding up.
When it comes to things like advanced driver assistance systems, there is a real level of public ambivalence. Part of that goes back to when people buy the vehicles: you get in there, you take your vehicle out for a test drive and the guy who is in there with you says, “Oh, let me just switch that off.” People just do not have any awareness of what these systems do. At best, people tolerate them. At worst, people are turning them off because they find them a nuisance. The lane-keeping one is the one that always springs to mind, particularly with IAM members—they do not like it. We are at a stage now where, as good as the technology that is going into vehicles is, we need to have a much higher level of engagement with the public about what these systems do and what they mean, not just for them but for everybody on the road.
Steve Cole: Just to build on that, in the US our counterparts have put in place a whole set of education programmes. There is a website called MyCarDoesWhat.org to basically demystify ADS systems. The other issue is that you have enormous variance between systems in cars and that sort of thing. That has been quite a strong programme they have run out there. You know how interventionist our US counterparts usually are about driving, and they feel like this is required.
Jamie Hassall: It is really important to pick up that we rely on these systems still working 10, 15 or 20 years later, and they are not part of the MOT. If you have your windscreen changed, a lot of your systems need to be recalibrated. Some manufacturers make it really hard for the windscreen replacers to access those systems to do that. There is stuff in the background that also needs to be sorted.
Q67 Dr Arthur: People who work in the sector to replace the windscreens—the more credible companies—are really concerned about this, because they see people going to cheaper providers and the safety is not quite there. Is there more the Government can do in the road safety strategy around this? Could we mandate use? Should you be expected to tell your insurance company if you are not using it? Should ADS be in the MOT test? Is there more we can do in the strategy?
Ross Moorlock: It is an important point about whether people are using the technology. At Brake, we have done some research in the last couple of years that has found that lots of people are switching the technology off. There is something in the investigation piece, and perhaps from an insurance perspective as well. If an investigation finds that a crash would not have happened or was likely not to have happened if a safety feature had been turned on within that vehicle, there should be ramifications. From an investigation and insurance perspective, there are important parts that can be played to make sure that people are using the technology and that it is having the benefit that it should deliver.
Steve Gooding: I just want to add that it would be great if all the advanced driver assistance systems worked and worked well, which they do not. What I would say is more power to the folks in the Department for Transport to work with colleagues at the UNECE on getting the most important ones. I put autonomous emergency braking right at the top of the list, which is very much met in the technical engineering standard but is not necessarily quite as brilliant at recognising that the pedestrian might not be standing exactly where the test suggested they were, because pedestrians have a tendency to move around. Coming up with better systems is a higher priority than worrying about all the bingle-bongles that most of us prefer to turn off.
Alex Mayer: I know I am not meant to ask a supplementary.
Chair: Go on, as it’s you.
Q68 Alex Mayer: Do we not have to make it easy for drivers? Frankly, I turn things on and off by mistake sometimes and think, “Why on earth have the seats started getting warm?”—whereas if there were a giant button that said “Safe” and I had to press it in, I am sure I would.
Steve Cole: With the ADS systems, you do not see the same sort of accident prevention warning methodology standardisation you have for, say, product safety. A really basic example would be that you get it on child car seats, because they are products and have quite clear standardisation, safety labelling and instructions, but you do not get it on an ADS system because that is not a bespoke product that you are buying in its own right; it is part of a car. There is a lot of learning you can take from product standards.
Q69 Alex Mayer: The highway code already says that lights should not be dazzling other drivers, yet drivers increasingly say that they are being dazzled by headlamps. Are the proposals in the road safety strategy going far enough to deal with this problem?
Steve Gooding: It is not clear exactly what the proposals are yet. Those of us engaged with the international vehicle standards people in the Department have all made it clear that this is an issue of the intensity, colour and wavelength of LED lighting that impacts the human eye in a different way from previous lighting systems, which has not been picked up in the international standards for intensity of lighting. The previous research that DFT and TRL did goes only so far; it does not go into whether this form of lighting has a different impact on the human eye. There is an associated issue with the growing body of evidence that humans are developing cataracts earlier than we thought. This is also causing a problem with glare; people far younger than me probably have early-onset cataracts and do not know it, and that is exacerbating the problem. I would say it is an optometry problem, not just a design problem.
Q70 Chair: I am an occasional driver, but almost always in London, where there are streetlights. Is there evidence that too many drivers do not understand dipped and undipped headlights?
Jamie Hassall: I have a car with automatic headlights that do not work very well. If there is a dual carriageway and it cannot see the lights on the side, it does not necessarily dip them, or it dips them a bit late. Technologies like this are good and useful. My wife does not perhaps use her main beams as often as I would like her to, but the systems that are designed to help you can actually make the problems worse for other people.
Q71 Olly Glover: Could I ask Jamie a very quick follow-up on the headlamps thing? I am just interested in what you say about the automated tech, because I tend to cycle around my constituency, and a lot of that is unlit roads. My subjective experience is that dipping is getting a lot worse. Does the automation thing detect things like bicycle lights, as far as you are aware?
Jamie Hassall: It will eventually, but depending on how bright your lights are; it senses them and works out that it is probably a light and will turn them off.
Olly Glover: That is a difficult one, because a lot of people complain that cyclists now have too many lights that are too bright, so it feels like a bit of a lose-lose situation.
Jamie Hassall: It is. The other thing I would say about dipped beams is that people do not appreciate that the distance of vision is only sufficient if you are travelling at about 30 mph. Generally speaking, we do not see something in the middle of the road, but the lights are not great as they stand so there are lots of issues around lights that need to be sorted.
Nicholas Lyes: There is another aspect to this. The research that we have done suggests that fewer people are now driving in the dark, and that is directly attributed to the dazzling effects of headlight glare. There is an independence issue that needs to be looked at here as well.
Chair: I am aware of that.
Olly Glover: Sorry, Chair; I shall recover time with the next question.
Chair: No, go on—it was an important discussion.
Q72 Olly Glover: It is not perception but fact that vehicle sizes have been increasing over the decades. The Department for Transport says that it is undertaking research on the impact of larger vehicles. What key questions do you think that research should be seeking to answer?
Steve Gooding: The key things are that there is evidence out there that there are bigger, taller vehicles, when we are thinking about the safety of pedestrians and cyclists, for example, and visibility standards for the driver. Can they see what is in front of them? Also—coming back to our tech point—do things like autonomous emergency braking adequately counter the fact that these are bigger and taller vehicles trundling around the road? The data might reveal that there is an intimidation factor that we do not particularly like, but in terms of specific safety risk AEB might be part of the answer. That is the thing that we think DFT research needs to unpick.
Jamie Hassall: Some of this is driver safety versus other people’s safety. The larger the vehicle you are in, the safer you are if you crash into something else, especially if it is smaller and that almost needs to be reflected. If you are going to buy a massive SUV, you are going to be safer than driving around in a Mini, but the Mini or one of those micro cars is much more environmentally friendly and better for sight.
Chair: The kinetic energy of a collision is a lot less.
Jamie Hassall: Exactly. We should almost say that actually, if you pick a bigger vehicle, your penalties for doing stuff wrong should be higher or that there should be something that encourages people to pick more sensible vehicles for everyone, not just safer vehicles for themselves.
Steve Cole: The weight on these things is really interesting for breakdown vehicles. We are increasingly seeing that the flatbeds that take cars away after accidents or after they have broken down do not have the carrying capacity for them. That leads to more congestion, longer times and that sort of thing.
Q73 Jacob Collier: Research from NFU Mutual says that the number of lives lost on rural roads is 72% higher than on urban roads. Clearly, as we have already heard from your evidence, this needs to be a key focus. Do you think that the strategy does enough to propose practical action to reduce KSIs on rural roads?
Steve Gooding: The strategy is promising a look into this; it is not actually promising anything specific. The thing we have pointed out is that the definition of a rural road is “not urban” which does not really help very much. We need to be clear which type of rural road we are talking about. In my mind’s eye, a rural road looks a bit like a country lane. Actually, dual carriageways in country areas after long stretches of single carriageway are quite dangerous, because that is when people think, “Good: I will now overtake, and I’m going to overtake at all costs,” which is when they crash. One of the first things DFT needs to do is have a look at the work that we did with the company Agilisys and work out what roads we are really talking about and what is going on.
Jamie Hassall: It must hit the strategy. Is there detail in there on how? No.
Q74 Jacob Collier: What do you think are the practical interventions that can be put in place to improve safety on our rural roads?
Nicholas Lyes: We have to be prepared to invest in rural road infrastructure, whether that is the unclassified roads, single carriageway, single track roads or dual carriageways. We have to be prepared to make those interventions. Without them, I do not think a great deal is going to change.
Ross Moorlock: I would just say that speed—specifically the speed limits on those roads—needs to be factored in and considered too.
Steve Cole: Rural roads are often more attractive to motorcyclists. We know motorcycles are a far more dangerous form of vehicle, so it is about making the infrastructure appropriate to the types of vehicle that tend to use them.
Nicholas Lyes: The risks and dangers on rural roads are very different. A lot of drivers, when they come off the M1 because there is a collision and use these roads, do not really change their behaviours. They are focused on the journey rather than on the parts of the journey that carry different risks.
Q75 Chair: Should the default 60 mph limit be reconsidered? If so, what speed is an appropriate default limit on English roads?
Jamie Hassall: It is really difficult. You could say, “Well, let’s take it to 40 mph,” but you could find that there are lots of situations in which it could be faster or should be much slower, and then perhaps people start thinking 40 mph is safe. You need some kind of hierarchy of road. I have this whole thing where if the road is only wide enough for one vehicle, what is an appropriate speed limit for that? You are going to have cyclists, walkers, animals and stuff like that.
Nicholas Lyes: You have to be very careful. Our preference would be targeted limit reductions in certain areas where the data supports that. The issue that you have with a reduction in the overall speed limit on a national single carriageway is that you will encourage people to overtake. That in itself is incredibly risky on a rural road.
Chair: It goes back to the importance of driving with due care and attention appropriate to speed and all that, even when there is an incident.
Steve Cole: The collision investigation element plays into that because you highlight the roads. The simple maxim we use—I think you guys use one in advanced driver training—is people will often say, “How far could you drive with your eyes closed?” When you look at rural roads, for example, when is the next bend? Because you cannot see past that. That is all proportionate and skill-based, rather than just applying a blanket piece of legislation to it.
Nicholas Lyes: I know the Scottish Government recently consulted on this and moved away from it because of the evidence.
Steve Gooding: They did intervene on specific rural roads, particularly around Loch Lomond and places like that.
Q76 Laurence Turner: Moving on to the design of streets, I suspect that colleagues have the same experience as mine, which is that constituents are often looking for modifications to roads to tackle dangerous driving. The Department seems to be setting a lot of store by updating the manual for streets. Do you think this is the right emphasis? What has changed, in your view, since the manual was last changed in 2007?
Jamie Hassall: It is the right approach, but it comes back to funding. You can have a lovely new standard, but what if you cannot afford to make those changes? Some things that have changed are obviously big, heavy electric bikes; you now almost need to segregate them from the other traffic. We have a complicated situation, with little funding to actually implement it. Yes, update the standard but the important factor is how that is going to be implemented.
Steve Cole: Design standards in all safety—construction, housing and workplace—work and pattern books work, but only with investment.
Q77 Laurence Turner: It seems that local authorities quote wildly different figures for the costs of simple interventions. Do you think there is a role for the Department through that setting of common design standards in trying to drive down some costs of delivering these interventions?
Steve Cole: Bulk procurement is really complicated for local authorities in all areas because you also have massive capacity issues. I suspect what you would find—I do not have the international data, only my experience of it—is you almost certainly have very overstretched transport planning officers who are putting this in place and maybe not getting the best value for money out of that. Replacing that with a centralised Government system probably would not be as good as having another 0.5 person working on transport planning. It is about the appropriate apportionment of funding to skills.
Laurence Turner: It is probably more for a combined authority.
Steve Cole: Yes, combined authority level. Housing is a good example of that, where you have seen combined authorities able to drive better value in housing procurement than individual local authorities because they have more staff and greater purchasing power.
Jamie Hassall: Maybe Transport for London could answer that better.
Steve Gooding: The right role for the Department for Transport there—apart from setting the design standard, which is lovely but gets overtaken over time—is to find examples of why this is. If something is costing a lot more in one place than another, find out why that is and see what is to be done about it. Sometimes that will turn out to be because of the engineering of that particular location. Maybe there are all sorts of utility services under that particular stretch of road that make it very expensive to dig up.
I remember long ago the standard design of what we used to call sleeping policemen. DFT required them to go curb to curb, which created huge drainage problems and made them very expensive because the entire drainage system had to be revisited. You can pick things up like that just by posing the question, “Why is that costing him more than it’s costing her?”, and drilling into it.
Q78 Jacob Collier: Do you think that the Department’s consultation on motoring offences focuses on the right priorities to improve road safety?
Nicholas Lyes: Mostly, but enforcement is the key aspect here. What you generally tend to find, particularly with changes in penalties, is that there is an initial bit of fanfare, behaviour changes a little, but then bad habits start to creep back. We need to focus more on a fundamental behavioural shift than anything else.
I would say that education or re-education should perhaps be a little more prominent. We know that drink-driving rehabilitation courses work in reducing re-offending, and it is the same with the NDORS national speed awareness courses. We also know, from talking to the police and from the various levels of data that are coming out, that drug-driving is now a huge problem. There is no national standard for a drug-driving rehabilitation course, so we need to see that come forward. I know that there has been some work by the TTC Group that has looked into this. It will take time to make it as productive and impactful as the drink-driving awareness course. I would have loved to see much more on the drug-driving element, because I genuinely think that there is a rampant problem out there.
Q79 Jacob Collier: How do you think that we get that balance between the tough penalties but also, as you say, rehabilitation to ensure that people are not continuing these behaviours? Do you have any thoughts on that?
Nicholas Lyes: The evidence and the research out there suggest that driver training schemes make a difference. We should be focusing on those as much as we possibly can.
Steve Cole: On the drug-driving point, this is about prescription medication as much as illegal drugs, because we see prescription medications as a big driver of accidents in other areas. We know anecdotally that that is the case with driving; there is not quite the compelling data yet, but if you were tackling it you would want to tackle both sides of it. It would be important to think that it could be people taking everyday medication for all kinds of things as well as just people using illegal drugs.
Jamie Hassall: We need to look at the system as a whole. When Scotland lowered its drink-driving limit, nothing changed, because the police did not take any extra action—they did not have alcohol logs and all these things. The system needs to be looked at to make sure that there is funding for the police to do the enforcement. We are looking at prevention as much as the detection side, so having a system that relies on detection is not ideal. What we want is prevention and then the police to just target the few who choose to abuse the system.
Q80 Olly Glover: You touched on this earlier; someone talked about traffic police numbers. Are police forces currently equipped to deliver the level of enforcement needed to make elements of the strategy effective?
Steve Cole: No is the short answer.
Jamie Hassall: No. Driver behaviour has deteriorated since covid as well, and that is a really important issue about having more police.
Steve Cole: That is the case, again, in a lot of areas of accident prevention, for example dogs. There is a public behavioural discourse piece there as well.
Q81 Olly Glover: I have a quick supplementary on that. We have heard some views that there is real variation and inconsistency in areas about how well-equipped local police forces are. Would you agree with that?
Steve Cole: Yes.
Jamie Hassall: Their approach differs as well.
Q82 Olly Glover: In terms of what they enforce and how?
Jamie Hassall: Exactly. There is one police force that does not have any fixed cameras. I am not saying that is right, but actually it is quite a—
Steve Cole: A lot of specialist skills are required within the traffic officer role—breathalyser testing and those sorts of thing. It is also about people staying in post; you get variance just within people making up the police force.
Q83 Olly Glover: So as well as the numbers we need consistency in training standards and so on?
Steve Cole: Yes.
Q84 Chair: Other countries have foreign police forces doing different things and have specific, dedicated traffic police. Is there any kind of appetite for that in the UK?
Jamie Hassall: We have transport police already and they are very effective, especially at reopening train lines and things like that. There is, but there will be cross-boundary issues, for example cross-border drug trafficking. Road policing is a massive area that has so many extra benefits to policing that it is surprising it is so underfunded.
Q85 Chair: We have come to the final question. Thank you, everyone: we have caught up on time. Considering everything that we have discussed today, in your view, if the Government implemented the sum total of the measures in their strategy, would it be enough to meet the Government’s targets?
Steve Gooding: The reason why that is a hard question to answer is that if the Government do everything and it is down to them, they will only have done their bit. As we have discussed today, so much of the strategy depends on others doing their bit as well. Unless Government do their bit, they will not achieve it. If they do, they still need the co-operation of the auto industry, local highway authorities, National Highways and drivers.
Ross Moorlock: It will take us a fairly significant stride forward. My view is that the measures alone will not enable us to reach the reduction targets. Further measures on top of those in the strategy will be required to hit the targets over the next 10 years.
Nicholas Lyes: This is step one and we probably have another 150-odd steps to go, but it started in the right place and looks to end in the right place. It is about the filling now.
Jamie Hassall: I would say the road safety investigation branch. If they get that right, it will build the foundations we need to achieve this. If they get that wrong—
Steve Cole: I would not add much to that—just that tempo and investment are probably the key things. The sooner they start doing things, the more likely they are to achieve them all.
Chair: Thank you for those very thoughtful answers and contributions. Feel free to write in with anything you have not been able to cover, or cover adequately, in your answers today. We will be holding more evidence sessions in this inquiry in the run-up to the summer, but that concludes today’s meeting.