WEDNESDAY 28 FEBRUARY 2007

MR PAUL SILVERWOOD, MR NEIL GREIG, MR ANDREW HOWARD AND MR EDMUND KING

  Q120  Chairman: Mr King, had you completed your comments?

  Mr King: Thank you, I had completed my remarks.

  Q121  Chairman: Thank you very much. Do you think that the collision involvement rate of novice drivers justifies the introduction of changes to traffic law and training and testing?

  Mr Howard: It certainly is probably the biggest single issue in road safety. There is a need to do something about it but there is a need to make sure that we keep that practical. Perhaps a lot of the time rather than looking at traffic law and training it is looking at the kinds of attitudes that we are giving our young drivers and looking at going back to when they get those attitudes, which is almost certainly at secondary school age or even earlier, and tackling them while they are of that age rather than waiting until they are of an age they can get behind the wheel.

  Q122  Chairman: If I could ask the RAC and the IAM, your evidence suggests that you do not support any concrete changes to the testing, training and licensing and you only advocate educational measures for novice drivers. How far back are you going to have to go before you change this attitude?

  Mr King: I think the evidence is you do have to go quite a long way back actually.

  Q123  Chairman: What does that mean exactly? Are we talking about pre-drive time? What are we talking about?

  Mr King: We are talking at least in secondary schools but there is good evidence even in primary schools that young children can learn a lot about road craft and safety and it affects attitudes. Certainly in secondary schools, like the Scottish project, Crash Magnets, which is within the curriculum and there are specific lessons. It is not about the physical nature of learning how to drive, in fact that is the easy bit, learning how to change gear and to steer, it is learning more about the consequences of your actions and responsibilities. That does have to start before you are behind the wheel. As to our colleague from the Under 17 Car Club, on my far left, I know at least four people who have been through his kinds of courses from the ages of 13, 14 and 15 with immense success because what it meant was when they went on the road at 17 to learn how to drive they were totally confident in terms of changing gear and steering and did not have to concentrate on that, they could concentrate on other aspects of driving. Certainly the people I know who have been through those courses have never had an accident and never had points on their licence. I know that is a self-selecting example but it does show that if people start thinking about the dangers before they get behind the wheel at 17 it can influence later events.

  Q124  Chairman: Are you really saying all the changes that we have had in the last 15 years have not produced any response at all?

  Mr King: No, I am not saying that, and I am not saying that the test cannot be improved and training cannot be improved and, in fact, welcome very much the Government's review that they are looking at these things. What I am saying is that much of it does come down to attitude. If you look at the work of psychologist Stephen Straddling talking about deliberate violations, it is not that these young drivers do not know how to drive but there is something in their personality, the buzz they get from driving, that they are deliberately making these mistakes. This is very difficult to address but we have to start at an earlier age to do that.

  Q125  Chairman: Do older and cheaper vehicles contribute because they do not have the same high standards of safety protection?

  Mr King: I think they do because there is evidence that 20% of young drivers drive vehicles that are 13 years or older and this means they are driving vehicles before the Euro NCAP crash testing programme came out approximately 10 years ago. That showed quite clearly that some of the vehicles, like the old Rover 100, were not intrinsically safe. If you have got a young driver in one of those vehicles and they have an accident the likelihood of them being injured, or seriously injured, is much higher. Our advice to parents is to look at the Euro NCAP crash test ratings and the irony is most young drivers—

  Q126  Chairman: They do not actually do that, do they, Mr King? Forgive me for saying so but we have had this evidence before and the reality is that they do not even look at it in relation to their own cars, so why would they look at it in relation to anybody else's?

  Mr King: I think the reality is that is now changing and some manufacturers, such as Renault, are embracing Euro NCAP in their advertising and putting that their cars achieve five stars and I do not think they would be doing that if they did not think it had an effect. All of these processes take time but the problem for many young drivers is they cannot afford the newer and better cars so they tend to buy the older cars that are less safe. When I was a student I had a Citroen 2CV and knowing what I now know about crash testing I would not drive one of those cars now.

  Q127  Chairman: There is always hope that wisdom comes with age even if it is not borne out by the statistics. You do not actually support the introduction of graduated licensing, do you, you say that education and training is more effective. Do you have evidence?

  Mr King: We have not opposed the introduction of graduated licensing. It depends how it is introduced. There are some elements of it that could be useful and could be done on a voluntary scale. For example, raising awareness of the dangers of having three or four people in the car, raising the awareness of dangers of driving at night, those things are not known amongst parents. One thing they do in America that AAA does is they have a parent-teen driving agreement and that is what the parent signs up to to help their son or daughter learning how to drive and it talks about driving at night and not driving with friends. I think a lot of that can be done through an educational process which we have not tried to do yet in this country.

  Q128  Chairman: Is there any evidence to back that up? Mr Howard, do you have evidence of some sort you want to give us?

  Mr Howard: If you look at young drivers in particular it is very easy to see in figures that their accident rate per mile goes absolutely through the roof in the early hours of the morning. Between two o'clock and five o'clock in the morning we are talking of a young male having an accident risk 17 times that of the average male driving at the average time of day.

  Q129  Chairman: That is not the point that was being made, with respect. That is really not the point that was being made. Mr King's point was simpler, that if you educate parents to make sure firstly they ensure the people are driving, you cannot say crash worthy vehicles, safer vehicles than others, that would make a difference, and also if you educated them so that they insisted they would not drive with other youngsters in the car. That is a very different thing, is it not?

  Mr Howard: If the parents have the control of their youngsters that would be a wonderful way to do it. As you see in the document, we have suggested that perhaps there is a halfway house between graduated driving licensing and the education idea, which is having some sort of code applied to young drivers, perhaps in The Highway Code, where we say what they should not be doing and if they commit any offence and are breaching that code we treat that offence more seriously rather than making breaking the code an offence in its own right.

  Q130  Chairman: And who, pray, will take this gentle judgment when they are dealing with a road traffic accident in the middle of the night? The police officer called to the scene will have sufficient flexibility to decide whether, in fact, the driver was guilty not only of the obvious things but of breaking this code, is that right?

  Mr Howard: Whether or not the code had been broken would come out quite easily in court after the accident, if it makes court, in exactly the same way as any other breach of The Highway Code would come out.

  Chairman: Mr Martlew looks very disbelieving.

  Q131  Mr Martlew: I am concerned because some of the things you are saying about young drivers driving old cars, that has always been the case and you made the point yourself, Mr King, that you drove an old car. I think I drove an A35 which was probably totally unsafe, especially the way I used to drive it. You said there had been a change in attitude to driving by youngsters. Have you got any evidence of that?

  Mr King: Two points. May I just clarify the old cars point. I was not saying that was the reason why young drivers have or do not have accidents; I was saying if they do have an accident the severity of that accident will be worse because the car is less safe. That is a fact.

  Q132  Mr Martlew: It has always been the case, has it not?

  Mr King: Yes, absolutely.

  Q133  Mr Martlew: That does not explain the increase in the numbers of young people.

  Mr King: No.

  Q134  Mr Martlew: What is the reason?

  Mr King: I think the reason, to go back to the basics I talked about, is if you look at things like drink-driving and seat belt wearing, what we have found over the last four or five years after years of those things decreasing is they have started to increase again. I think one of the reasons for that is that education campaigns are not having the effect now they had 10 or 15 years ago. Ten or 15 years ago it really did change social attitudes amongst young people. I think this is where we have to be much more subtle and much cleverer in getting the message across. Young people today are not watching ITV at 8.30 at night before Christmas when Cliff Richard comes on singing about mistletoe and wine, that will not get through to young people today; maybe it did 10 or 15 years ago. This is where we have to use multimedia to get through to them, things like MySpace and viral messages. We have to adapt because the figures clearly show this is why they are dying. If they are dying for drink-driving it is not because they have not had a graduated test, it is because the message has not got across. If they are dying because they have not got seat belts on it is nothing to do with the driving test, it means that they are less risk averse. All I am saying is that we should not forget those fundamental things that we were successful at changing perhaps 10 or 15 year sago.

  Q135  Mr Martlew: Mr Silverwood, do you agree with that? You obviously deal with a lot of youngsters.

  Mr Silverwood: To a great extent, yes. The statistics are bearing out the fact that a lot of people are dying because they are no longer clunk-clicking every trip as we used to when I started driving. There are other issues here that we have not touched upon but I cannot evidence them. We are seeing a more laddish, laddette-ish binge drinking culture than we had 20 years ago and that may also be having an effect. When they are learning to drive on the road they are cocooned, they are not having to get from A to B in a short space of time because of social or business pressures, they are also driving within the limit and they have got somebody sitting beside them. As soon as they pass their test we take all those restraints away and on the roads every day they see some appalling bad driving and they think, "People are getting away with this, why can't I?" There is also a feeling of invincibility as soon as you pass your test. While we are talking about cars, yes their cars are older now but they are not as old as the car that I learned to drive in which had cable brakes. You had to anticipate half an hour before you wanted to stop in that thing! You did learn the appreciation of hazard awareness much earlier.

  Q136  Clive Efford: Can I ask you, Mr Silverwood, do you support the introduction of a minimum learning period?

  Mr Silverwood: Yes, provided (a) it is part of a package of measures and (b) it is not just simply a period of time. You talked earlier about how you would prevent somebody, if it was 12 months long, cramming everything into the last couple of weeks before the 12 months were up, but you also have to link it to the amount of time they spend on the road and through conditions. That is experience. What we have not yet tackled is the root cause of this, which is attitude to driving. Technical skill is one thing, and that is what the DSA test does to an extent, but what it does not really test is driver attitude. We believe that you can get the appropriate attitude through training. Getting them at a young age, making them appreciate that driving is a privilege and not a right, risk and reward, so if you lowered the age to 16 and a half or 16 but moved back the date at which they could take their test and had a programme in-between of attitudinal as well as technically based driving and tested the attitude through something like driving commentary, which shows the examiner exactly what you are seeing and what you appreciate in the way of hazards, I think that would make a significant difference. I know I said in the submission on behalf of the Car Club that our accident rate on a survey we have done over the last six years was for members who have now gone on to the real road that we could halve the accident rate because it is only one in 10 as opposed to one in five, but when you look at those who have got over the first year of driving they are driving for 14 years per accident, only one accident per 14 years of driving. I do not know what it is nationally.

  Q137  Clive Efford: Can I just ask you about your statistics here. In your evidence you have demonstrated that you can reduce accident rates to one in 10 from one in five, but where does that leave young novice drivers in terms of the proportion of the overall accidents? Does that bring them down to the average or are they still above the average?

  Mr Silverwood: You are comparing the first year of driving, you are not comparing that with the average driver, say, from 25-59. It is a whole combination of things. What you cannot substitute is experience, experience of different driving conditions, driving in the snow and ice that we have had recently, driving in the fog, you cannot replicate that on a test.

  Q138  Clive Efford: I suppose what I am driving at—excuse the pun—is how much is it the quality of the instruction that makes them aware of the sorts of hazards or situations they may encounter on the road and how much of it is what Mr King was talking about earlier on, the fact that they are too cavalier about the risks?

  Mr Silverwood: There is a cavalier approach, and I accept that, but in terms of how much of that is due to the instruction that they receive, I do not think we can pin that on the ADIs because they are really only responding to the test, they are teaching people how to pass the test, they go over the test routes and they are assessed and get new customers based on the success rates of their candidates passing the test. If they were rewarded or judged on the number of accidents their youngsters had once they had passed the test that would be a far more efficient way of getting them to focus on not just passing the test but on real driving, driving experience, driving for life, so they do appreciate those hazards. If you could build into the test that kind of appreciation with, say, a graduated scheme that would have an effect. One of the things we are proposing is the test is the first part of it, if you move on to a cross between the Pass Plus scheme, which does not require you to pass your test, you simply have to pay some money and turn up, if you combine that with something like a RoSPA or IAM advanced test, somewhere in-between, and you do test them, at which point they get a full licence, then I think we will see a dramatic reduction.

  Q139  Clive Efford: Can you give us some examples of where your 11-17 club has made a real difference? I had never heard of it before I got the briefing for this inquiry. I have got children who are exactly the age that your club deals with. How do you make sure that parents are aware that there is this club?

  Mr Silverwood: Our problem is that we are limited to the number of children we can have at any one time, which is 300. We have been going since 1976, so we are now in our 32nd year of operation. Very few people have heard of us simply because we do not advertise. We do not need to, we have got a waiting list until 2008, so we would not spend members' money advertising on something which a very few people can join.