WEDNESDAY 28 FEBRUARY 2007

MR NICK STARLING, MR JUSTIN JACOBS AND MR DOMINIC CLAYDEN

  Q63  Chairman: Do you have anything to say before we begin questions? You do not. Does the collision involvement rate of novice drivers justify the introduction of significant changes to traffic law and the driver training and testing regime?

  Mr Starling: Yes, we think it does. This is a major issue and it is why we launched a campaign on this very subject in September of last year. Road safety is improving overall. It is not improving but getting worse for young drivers. There is a disproportionate number killed and seriously injured. We have various statistics. I would add one to the mix, which is that a 17 to 20 year old male driver is 10 times more likely to be killed or seriously injured than other drivers. We think there are very particular problems round the sorts of accidents, accidents involving large numbers of passengers in the car but also accidents which occur at night. It is a major problem. We are concerned about it and we think that it is time to take action on it.

  Q64  Chairman: If no-one else has a point on that, I turn to driver training. The collision liability of novice drivers decreases sharply during the first six months of post-test driving. How can driver training equip novice drivers better with this experience before passing the test?

  Mr Starling: We think that the key here is to have more structured learning. At the moment, driver training seems to be geared towards the techniques of passing the test and, as other witnesses have said, we think it is a matter of teaching safe driving. We do think that there needs to be much more structured learning to try to build as much experience in before the test as possible. We think this should be done via a logbook and a minimum learning period.

  Q65  Mr Scott: Why do you support a minimum learning period of 12 months?

  Mr Starling: We think, first, that 12 months would have an impact. We think there would be around 1,000 fewer killed and seriously injured if we had a 12-months period. That is from the DfT statistics. The advantage of 12 months is that it gives you the range of experience. For example, at the moment you can pass your test without having driven in the dark. It gives you the range of experience at times of year, conditions and so forth, and it enables time for experience to kick in. Our experience is that the longer you learn, the more experience you build up. In fact, it lasts as far as we can see, for a lifetime. If you have plenty of training before the test, you are a safer driver throughout your life.

  Q66  Mr Scott: How do you make sure that people did not punch up the lessons in, say, the last two months before their year is up, that they did not do exactly what you are saying but had 10 months of doing nothing and then two months of punching it in before they took the test? How would you suggest that is covered?

  Mr Starling: You would have to do that through the structure of the logbook. You would have to make sure it set out the sort of experience you needed and conditions. I think that is how you would cover that particular issue.

  Q67  Mrs Ellman: A lot has been said about the importance of driving experience rather than the theory of it, but the insurance companies put an additional premium on learner drivers. This is not helping, is it?

  Mr Jacobs: Insurance is widely available for learner drivers. It is available both if the learner driver wants to go on to their parents' policy or if they need a policy in their own right. You get tailored policies. You can have them for four weeks to six months to fit your own learning pattern. I think insurance is widely available. It may cost a bit more to add a learner driver to a policy because the risks are going up. A learner driver has more accidents than someone who is 30 to 59 years old and the premium has to reflect that, but learner driver premiums are a lot less than newly qualified driver premiums and that because the newly qualified driver is at the most dangerous part of their driving experience. Learner drivers are safer, so the premiums for learner drivers are cheaper than for newly qualified drivers, but they will be more than for the average 30 to 59 year old because the risks are greater.

  Q68  Mrs Ellman: How much are you talking about?

  Mr Jacobs: It varies a lot depending on where you live and the sort of car you are driving. The market statistics we have show that for a learner driver it may be in the region of several hundred pounds, maybe £500, £600, £700, and that is less than for a newly qualified driver, for whom it would be over £1,000, but the average premium at the moment is around £400 to £500. Those are the sorts of numbers we are talking about.

  Q69  Mr Hollobone: Everyone passes the same test and the job of the insurance industry is to price the risk of that person having an accident in that vehicle. They are the only people who are assessing the risk and pricing it. Therefore, the question to yourselves is: what extra tuition would you require of a novice driver in order to offer them the same premium as an experienced driver? Your answer to that question would then be: the extra training that is required before they pass their licence.

  Mr Jacobs: To get the same premium, you need to get the same risk. In other words, the first question is: can a newly qualified driver's premium ever be the same as that of a more mature driver who has had lots of driving experience? That is probably a very ambitious target. We do want to make sure that we bring down the risk level of newly qualified drivers.

  Q70  Chairman: We know that bit. Mr Starling, what is your answer?

  Mr Starling: I will ask Mr Clayden to answer that.

  Mr Clayden: Can I give you a context? Within Norwich Union, I look after the team that handles all of the injury claims. The way the premium is built up, as Justin Jacobs was saying, is that we look at our data and understand what the cost of claims arising from a person is. There is no doubt that one of the biggest features with young drivers is the major large injuries that occur. To give you a context, I see every two days somebody who has suffered either a severe brain or spine injury that can render them totally disabled for the rest of their life. From an insurance point of view, those cases are extremely expensive and from a personal impact point of view, devastating to the person and their family. One of the features to take the cost down is premium. That is hugely important but one of the major features I would ask you to consider is cutting down on the number of passengers a young driver can have in the car, particularly late at night. That is the feature that stands out in our statistics: young drivers out after 11 o'clock at night with three or four passengers in the car. It is expensive and there are awful accidents.

  Chairman: I will come back to you, Mr Hollobone after Mrs Ellman.

  Q71  Mrs Ellman: It has been suggested in your evidence that novice drivers with penalty points should be forced to undertake further training with A&E departments or the police. Is there actual evidence that is going to make an effective change?

  Mr Starling: I do not think we made that specific suggestion in our evidence. We are very much in favour of wider education. The sorts of points Mr Clayden has made are good points about telling people what the impact of accidents is. Quite often young people tend to think about death, they do not tend to think about lifetime disabilities.

  Q72  Chairman: It was Norwich Union who said that.

  Mr Clayden: Sorry, could you repeat the question, I have lost my train of thought completely. Apologies.

  Q73  Chairman: We are repeating to you what you have actually said. You are suggesting that there are could be half-day courses in A&E on road crashes and the impact on daily lives, police demonstrations plus presentations on the legal requirements and consequences of not adhering to driving legislation.

  Mr Clayden: The experience that we have is from speaking to people day-to-day who are, in effect, the causes of accidents, because the way the system works is we indemnify somebody who has had an accident that is their fault. Fundamentally these are nice people who have done something which they just did not have in their concept before. Our experience is if they have more understanding of the consequences of driving in an unsafe way they would perhaps view it differently.

  Q74  Chairman: Mrs Ellman very specifically asked you, and I think it is a valid question, what makes you think it works because experience says you can frighten people for a short period of time and as soon as it is comfortable for them they forget it.

  Mr Clayden: Our experience would be even just a short period of time would help in terms of drop-off of safety if you are talking about people just reflecting over a period of months or a year.

  Q75  Chairman: Have you got evidence to support that? That was what Mrs Ellman was asking.

  Mr Clayden: We would not have evidence, it is anecdotal from speaking to people after accidents.

  Q76  Chairman: If I had just been in an accident and you said to me, "Would you behave differently had you seen the accident and emergency department at the Ambridge District Hospital?", my opinion at that very moment might not be entirely representative of what I might do and think for the rest of the year, might it?

  Mr Clayden: To us there is no individual silver bullet that would solve the problem. We tend not to see people immediately after the accident, it may be several weeks or months after.

  Chairman: We are not looking for silver bullets, we are looking for brass jackets, that would help.

  Q77  Mrs Ellman: How would you raise the standards of driving instruction?

  Mr Starling: We think it is more about the structure of what people need to be taught rather than the instructors themselves. Proposals about a more structured learning period will then lead to a better outcome. We have not got specific concerns about the actual standards of instruction at the moment, instructors are instructing what they have to do, it is a matter of changing what they have to do.

  Q78  Mrs Ellman: Has anyone looked at the Government's new proposals on the driving instruction test published this week?

  Mr Starling: We all have, yes.

  Q79  Mrs Ellman: Have you got any views on that? Is it positive?

  Mr Starling: We very much welcome what they have put forward and we like to think they have listened to what we have been saying in putting it forward. We think that the proposals around training, the test and lifetime training, are extremely good and interesting and we look forward to working with them on that. We do think they need to go further. We think they need to take action on graduated licensing and specifically on the number of passengers in the car. We think it is a good start and we welcome it.