House of Commons Hansard Debates for 27 Jun 1989

Written Answers to Questions

Tuesday 27 June 1989

TRANSPORT

Road Safety

Mr. Knox : To ask the Secretary of State for Transport what contribution he expects the proposals in "Road Users and the Law" to make towards his target for reducing casualties in his policy document, "Road Safety : The Next Steps."

Mr. Peter Bottomley : In 1987 we set the target of reducing casualties by one third by the year 2000. That means a reduction of some 100,000 deaths and injuries. Our priority must be the deaths and serious injuries.

In 1988 we made good progress towards this. Deaths decreased by 2 per cent. compared with 1987, and were 10 per cent. down compared to the baseline of our target. Serious injuries were down by 1 per cent. compared with 1987, 15 per cent. compared with the target baseline. This represents good progress, particularly as traffic volumes continue to rise.

Publication of the North report, and the White Paper "The Road User and the Law", (Cm. 576) has helped considerably to increase the awareness of the need for action to cut road casualties, and to give such action much higher priority. The proposals in the White Paper are an important part of the Government's overall package of measures which, by changing public attitudes, improving enforcement and adopting improved road engineering techniques are together designed to achieve the target.

Road Traffic Law

Mr. Knox : To ask the Secretary of State for Transport if he will make a statement on any progress made in implementing some of the non- legislative recommendations of the road traffic law review which he accepted.

Mr. Peter Bottomley : The White Paper "The Road User and the Law" sets out the Government's proposals for taking forward the non-legislative recommendations accepted from the road traffic law review.

We have received many positive and helpful comments from interested organisations. We will now be discussing with them how best to take forward, jointly, the non-legislative aspects of the White Paper. We shall also be adding a number of projects to our research programme to follow up those aspects of the North report which require further research.

Rail Freight (Barnes Bridge)

Sir Barney Hayhoe : To ask the Secretary of State for Transport what information he has on the average weekly amount of rail freight transported over Barnes bridge and its average journey length ; and what assessment has been made of the equivalent number of average road freight vehicle miles this represents.

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Mr. Peter Bottomley : This information is not known to the Department.

Roads (Liverpool)

Mr. Alton : To ask the Secretary of State for Transport how much his Department has given for road building and improvement in Liverpool ; and if he will list the Liverpool city council plans it was allocated for, for each of the last five years.

Mr. Peter Bottomley : There are no trunk roads in Liverpool. We support expenditure on the city council's more important roads through the transport supplementary grant system. The information requested is :