WEDNESDAY 21 MARCH 2007

MR NEIL CUNLIFFE, MR BRIAN PIERCE, MR JONATHAN SMITH AND SUPERINTENDENT TED THWAITES

  Q460  Mr Martlew: I hope you do think I am na-£ve, Mr Cunliffe, because unlike education where it is either free or you pay a fee, when you are taking driving lessons you pay per half hour, or whatever, so it is actually that which is the pressure put on the driving instructor to get people through as quickly as possible, is it not?

  Mr Cunliffe: But what is the naivety? At the end of the day it is not a right, it is something we have to work to achieve. What is the na-£ve part? I do not understand where you are coming from.

  Q461  Mr Martlew: I think what the Chairman was saying was that there would be pressure on the instructors to sign people off, perhaps if they were ready or not, because of the cost implications or the fact that they could go to another instructor who would do it.

  Mr Cunliffe: But then we have got to change that ethos. That is no different from MOTs years ago where you paid somebody in a back street to give you one. We have got to change the whole ethos of what we are trying to achieve. What we are trying to achieve is better, younger drivers for our future. It might be na-£ve to say at the start it is going to be difficult to do, but just because it is difficult does not mean to say we should not be doing it.

  Q462  Mr Martlew: You accept it will be difficult?

  Mr Cunliffe: I accept it will be difficult, but I think actually the work we have done is showing that yes, it can be achieved and if we can get an outcome then that should steer us into the future.

  Superintendent Thwaites: I would just like to make clear my position on the experience needed and just to pick up the point which my colleague from Lancashire has made, which is that it is possible that somebody could cram in the last two months of a 12 month period and therefore the 12 month period alone is not adequate. It is equally possible that if it was a 100 hour period that could be taken in two weeks, that somebody could take a crammer course, as people do now, and actually not have sufficient experience in a variety of conditions and over a variety of time to enable them to actually take their test. Therefore, I think a combination of the two, some amalgam of the two, is necessary.

  Mr Smith: Can I just suggest that one of the benefits of taking a longer time over the test is a matter which was raised in the previous evidence you received about age. The longer the graduated process takes the older the driver becomes, and the older they become the less risky their behaviour is likely to be.

  Q463  Chairman: What would your answer be, however, that if you make it more and more complex they will all try and avoid taking it and they will all be cheerfully taking to the roads without any insurance, any licence or any qualifications at all?

  Mr Smith: My view would be that there are some people, a very small minority of people, who commit crime and that includes driving without licences and without insurance. But it is a very small minority of people who do that and by and large most people are law-abiding citizens who will comply with the law. I agree that by making it more difficult, and certainly perhaps by making it most costly, there would be issues of equality and equity of access to private transport, which would be an issue in a rural county like Cumbria in particular. Nevertheless, I do not see that it would drive enormous numbers of people into illegality.

  Q464  Mr Martlew: On that very point—and you picked up on the rural aspect of a county like Cumbria, but obviously there are large towns like Carlisle and Barrow—there is a lot of young people who, if they are going to have any social life at all will need to learn to drive and get a licence as quickly as possible. Public transport is bad. Are you really suggesting that they should not be allowed to pass their test until they are 18?

  Mr Smith: I think Mr Martlew has a very valid point. He is on the absolute apex of the crux of the dilemma, is he not? It is not just about social activity either, it is about economic activity and educational opportunities. If you live in a county which is the second largest county in the UK and has a population about the size of Sheffield, then a very large proportion of your activities require you to be able to get about by private transport. Every year that passes in somebody's age they acquire more experience and generally become more imaginative about the consequences of their actions, which is revealed, I think, in the casualty trends that we see. However, to exclude people from the ability to move about independently in a deeply rural county where there is not much public transport could have a disastrous effect on the local economy, and I think that is a dilemma which needs to be addressed by this Committee.

  Q465  Chairman: There are lots of our cattle in Cumbria, so perhaps you could develop them as an alternative form of transport! Yes, Mr Pierce?

  Mr Pierce: I would like to support a lot of what has been said there. My concern is, do we actually have any evidence to show that those youngsters who are involved in some form of collision who are fortunately not killed, if they were to be given a re-test, have skills sufficiently good to pass that re-test? My assumption is that in a lot of occasions they would be, which would actually bring us back to the point that it is actually an attitudinal problem which is causing them to get involved in the crash. I would like to support the conversation earlier talking about the restriction possibly on the number of passengers at the younger stage, or after they have just passed their test, because there certainly is a correlation between the number of young people who have passengers of the same age and the likelihood of an accident or a crash increasing. So my belief is that it is still an attitudinal problem as well as skills. But coming back to the skills, I think the emphasis should be on absolutely identifying the minimum skills requirement of the test. The obvious things have been discussed in the past. It should involve motorway driving, it should involve night time driving, which we do not currently test. There should be a minimum skill pre-requisite, and obviously that would come with an allocated amount of time to achieve that skill.

  Chairman: Gentlemen, you have been most interesting and we are enormously grateful to you. I think, speaking personally, what you are trying to do is very important and I think this Committee welcomes that kind of educational and imaginative road safety scheme. Superintendent, do not take the Minister too much to heart!