UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 460 -i

House of COMMONS

MINUTES OF EVIDENCE

TAKEN BEFORE

Transport Committee

Road Safety

Wednesday 26 March 2008

PROFESSOR DANNY DORLING, DR NICOLA CHRISTIE and MR DAVID LYNAM

PROFESSOR RICHARD ALLSOP, MS HEATHER WARD and MR NICK STARLING

Evidence heard in Public Questions 1 - 105

USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT

Oral Evidence

Taken before the Transport Committee

on Wednesday 26 March 2008

Members present

Mrs Gwyneth Dunwoody, in the Chair

Clive Efford

Mrs Louise Ellman

Mr Philip Hollobone

Mr Eric Martlew

Mr Lee Scott

David Simpson

________________

Memoranda submitted by University of Surrey and Transport Research Laboratory

Examination of Witnesses

Witnesses: Professor Danny Dorling, Professor of Human Geography, University of Sheffield, Dr Nicola Christie, Head of Surrey Injury Research Group, University of Surrey, and Mr David Lynam OBE, Chief Research Scientist, TRL, gave evidence.

Chairman: May I welcome you to the committee. I ask for Members to declare any interests.

Mr Martlew: Member of Unite and GMB Unions.

Clive Efford: Member of Unite.

Chairman: Member of Aslef.

Mrs Ellman: Member of Unite.

Q1 Chairman: If there is nothing you want to say before we begin, may I say that we are very grateful to you for coming this afternoon. You will understand that the Committee takes a continuing interest in the business of road safety. We think it is very important. Perhaps it is not always treated with the urgency and importance that we think it should be. What do you think is the main role of government in relation to road safety? Mr Lynam, I am not sure whether your role now is pseudo governmental. I have the greatest admiration for your research laboratory but I am not sure whether you are fish, flesh, fowl or good red herring.

Mr Lynam: I think we are in the middle, as you rightly suggest. Obviously, we do a lot of work for the Department and we advise the Department through its Road Safety Division, which is responsible for setting up road safety strategies and targets and indeed pursuing policy to reduce casualties.

Q2 Chairman: Tell me what the main role of government is in relation to road safety.

Mr Lynam: My thinking in terms of government is that it needs to lead, which is one thing that I would like to talk about - we have not done that strongly in the past compared with some other countries - and lead by giving priority to road safety. Also clearly government's role is in terms of regulation where it has to decide the balance between the winners and the losers, if you like, which there always are in any sort of regulation, and how it produces a suitable balance for acceptability.

Q3 Chairman: Dr Christie, do you agree with that? Is there anything else?

Dr Christie: I think the Government has to be a champion for road safety. It has to lead by example. It has to keep it at the top of its priorities and take a holistic approach to casualty reduction. Alongside that is commissioning the right sort of research to answer any gaps in the evidence.

Q4 Chairman: Professor Dorling, is there anything else?

Professor Dorling: I would agree. I add that I think government needs to see road safety as a major public health issue, rather in the way that government did with sewerage over 150 years ago, with cigarettes over 50 years ago, and with mental health now. Road safety is a major public health issue for children and younger adults, and government needs to recognise it. When government recognises it as a major public health issue, it is likely to do more about it than it currently does.

Q5 Chairman: I think you are proving that we must not be too hasty, Professor, if it takes us 150 years to come to any conclusion. What role does road safety have in relation to wider transport policy or social, environmental and economic policy objectives?

Mr Lynam: One of the clear things that we have to do is to achieve an acceptability and credibility for any road safety policies. That means balancing the things that we are trying to do with road safety in relation to the other issues that are important for wider transport polices, such as the environment, mobility and accessibility. We need to find policies that do all of those whilst rooting them clearly, from our point of view, in a strong casualty reduction programme.

Q6 Chairman: Do you think it is sensible for the Government to include road safety in the same objective as protecting people's health?

Professor Dorling: Yes, because it is one of the major health risk factors for children and young adults in particular and for elderly adults. This is one of the major ways in which our young people die in this country. To see children dying as a result of a car hitting them as somehow different to children dying from meningitis ---

Q7 Chairman: It is in the sense that if the same numbers of young people died from meningitis, I think our red tops would be waxing extremely eloquent?

Professor Dorling: Yes. We have become used to this, acclimatised. I feel that we will begin to recognise it. The second point I should add is that other risks for children and young adults have, in general, reduced dramatically, particularly infectious diseases. As other risks reduce, the major risks that are left for our children are things like road traffic accidents. This has great effects on how we treat our children and what we let them do. So we severely curtail the freedoms of our children, particularly in affluent areas; we do not let them out, we do not let them play, we do not let them walk to school at ages that I used to walk to school. This has a very wide effect on society in general. My personal feeling is not whether it is going to be recognised or not, it is just simply when we are going to recognise this as the equivalent of the problems that we saw in the past with sewerage and cigarettes and that we currently are seeing with mental health.

Dr Christie: In some ways, road safety is forced between the gaps because it is inherently a multidisciplinary subject. It is about people's behaviour, the environment, people's travel mobility. I think the Department of Health needs to take more responsibility for health inequality alongside the Department for Transport. There are issues about illegal driving and unlicensed driving, and so the Home Office should be playing more of a role.

Chairman: We will need to explore most of those aspects.

Q8 Mr Scott: What measures do you think have been the most effective in reducing casualties since 2000?

Mr Lynam: First, we have this clear problem that the numbers of fatalities has not reduced as substantially as we would have liked since then. Clearly the sorts of measures that we are trying to put in place have not borne strongly on those. Clearly there has been an effect in the area of speeding policy. There is a lot further to go in terms of speeding policy but quite a lot of work has been done and there has been a change in attitudes in terms of the way in which speed cameras, for example, and other speed measures (speed limits) are being implemented. I think we can see some change there. There is continuing road engineering work which I think is effective but it needs to go to a different level now. I am happy to talk about that. With things like drink driving and helping young drivers through testing and training, in those areas we can see very little progress over that period.

Dr Christie: I would agree that engineering has played a major role in injury reduction.

Q9 Chairman: Let me differentiate. Are you talking just about engineering to vehicles or are you talking about road engineering?

Dr Christie: I am talking about road engineering, speed reduction, measures that change the environment and reduce the speed of vehicles, and traffic management as well, which reduces flow. The evidence for engineering measures is always reasonably strong. It is much more difficult to evaluate the impact of educational initiatives. People are occasionally dismissive of the role of education and publicity. Even though there is not good evidence, it does play an important role in raising awareness of risks. We need to think about the evidence we accept. In practice there might be a one-off educational initiative but it is very hard to link that to casualty reduction, but that does have a role to play right from the cradle to the grave.

Mr Lynam: To pick up on your earlier comment, Chairman, vehicle safety is clearly an area that has contributed substantially to that reduction since 2000. Many of the policies that have achieved that reduction were put in place before 2000 and now seem to be working through the vehicle fleet in that period. Some of the policies that we might have hoped would come forward on vehicles have not done so in that period.

Professor Dorling: I think I am right in saying that in 2000 we were third in the world, according to WHO, in having the lowest crude mortality rate from road traffic accidents. We did incredibly well at it. Although our place is lower on that international league table, I do not think we are now in the top 10 of the best countries. The most significant change, looking locally, is that in 2000-2001 we had a lower mortality rate on the roads than the Netherlands or Sweden and we now have a higher mortality rate than those countries. My colleagues will know more about this than me. What is important is not what we have done but that they have done more than we have and we have not yet learnt from what they have done.

Q10 Clive Efford: To clarify, are you saying that we have reduced the accident rate but not as fast as in other countries and therefore they have overtaken us?

Professor Dorling: Yes, so we have lost our place in the top 10. We were in the top three in 2000-2001.

Dr Christie: If you disaggregate the data, there is some truth in the top line figure that the UK is one of the leaders in road safety. Taking the figures for children, in the OECD countries we are 17 out of 25 or 30 countries that contribute to the international road traffic accident database. We are not as good as we thought we were with regard to children. I think how we treat our most vulnerable is important.

Q11 Mr Scott: What measures have not been effective and perhaps even counter-productive, if any?

Mr Lynam: I have commented already on drink driving and the education and training of drivers. In relation to the comment about other countries, what they have done, particularly since the millennium, which we have not done is make some hard decisions about trying to move forward in some of the areas that are more difficult; that involves investment in road infrastructure. It also involves creating a general vision of youth in what they are trying to achieve in a broader social and environmental sense. Those decisions and what they put in place to enact that sort of philosophy have moved them rather more ahead of where we are.

Q12 Mr Scott: Do you think there is a question of enforcement in that recently, as I am sure everyone would agree, wherever you go you still see people using their mobile phones and driving in a dangerous manner. The law is not being enforced. Would you agree that if the law is not going to be enforced, there is little point in having a law?

Mr Lynam: There is every point in having a law. They key point is to enforce it, as you say. You are quite right that enforcement is one of the areas where we have not made progress and potentially, if anything, we have gone backwards. We can see that with the drink driving example. If we turn to other countries and look at the rate of testing, for example in Sweden and the Netherlands, something like one in four or one in seven cars are tested every year. We did a comparison in Britain in 2003 and the figure was one in 26 cars. The amount of testing since then has reduced further. We are clearly not enforcing the law in anything like the same sort of way.

Q13 Mr Scott: Drink driving is socially unacceptable and so there has to be better enforcement of the law. I am particularly concerned, personally, with the mobile phone aspect. I think it is as dangerous as anything else and the law is not being enforced, in my view, at all. I do not see it being enforced anywhere.

Dr Christie: Does that relate to the amount of dedicated traffic policing? That has reduced substantially over the last five to 10 years.

Chairman: This Committee has expressed its views on the priorities that chief constables should give to traffic policing for that very reason.

Q14 Mrs Ellman: Which socio-economic or ethnic groups would you say are particularly at risk?

Mr Lynam: As my colleagues could tell you rather better than I, we have known for a long time that the people in deprived areas, disadvantaged people, have much higher fatalities rates in those sorts of areas. You probably know that the Government did set a target to reduce rates in those areas faster than in other areas in the first five years of this decade. They did achieve that but there is still a big gap between the groups in deprived areas and the groups in non-deprived areas.

Dr Christie: I think it is a shame that the Government set its target in the way that it did. It achieved it and many people working in the area of road traffic injury and deprivation just wondered what the point was if everyone thinks the target has been met, even though we know a large health inequality exists. It has been estimated that it is 21 times more likely that a child pedestrian from the lowest socio-economic group will be killed compared to from the top socio-economic group.

Q15 Mrs Ellman: Why do you think that information is not known more widely?

Dr Christie: I think it is a whole new area in terms of road safety. There has only been a real interest in this area probably since 1997 with the whole idea of neighbourhood renewal, disadvantage and health inequality. I think the formation of the Neighbourhood Renewal Unit made big strides in putting that particular target in with the other general road safety target but the NRU has now been disbanded.

Professor Dorling: The kinds of gaps we see between areas can be five-fold or ten-fold for the chance of a child being hit by a car. In addition to this huge health inequality, what worries me is that in the areas with the very lowest rates, the rates we are trying to get other areas down to, the reason why the rates are so very low is because there are no children on the pavements of the streets; there are no children on bikes; there are no children in any position to be hit by a car. My worry is that you could achieve your target and reduce the best down to a minimum by not letting children out at all. You need to think about ways to make the streets safer so that the children who currently are not going out can go out and fewer children in the poor areas are being killed. Do you see what I mean?

Q16 Chairman: I see what you mean but it is very difficult to do that sort of equation, is it not? It is like the person who says that the railways were quite safe over Easter because there were not any trains. It is not very helpful.

Professor Dorling: When we look at these targets and the difference between areas, the areas that are doing very well are mainly doing well because people wrapping their children in cotton wool.

Q17 Clive Efford: People from poorer communities are over-represented in many of the figures about disadvantage, health outcomes, et cetera. I can quite easily envisage why that is but I find it difficult to see why they are over-represented in traffic statistics. What is a failure? What is it that makes them the victim of road traffic accidents in that way?

Dr Christie: For example, in poor areas children are much less likely to travel by car because car ownership is very low; they are more likely to walk. They live in more dangerous areas. They tend to live in the older style, Victorian, grid-iron layouts with through roads and high traffic speeds, with on-street parking because that was the era when there was no provision for cars. They do not do very much after school. They do not go to supervised activities; their activity is to play out in the street. They are often playing in environments that are dangerous for other reasons related to traffic. We have done research in 11 of the poorest areas in England. When we talk to parents of children, they say that there are young people on motorised two-wheel vehicles and joy-riding and speeding in cars, which is seen as a recreational pursuit, mounting the pavements with a disregard for children playing in the areas. There is a feeling that the police are not that interested in what is going on; there is a feeling of abandonment, that all this is destroying their quality of life and people are being injured. The people in these vehicles are injuring themselves and others.

Q18 Clive Efford: To follow that up, if we put you in charge, what would you change that would address those issues?

Dr Christie: The environment.

Q19 Clive Efford: What do you mean by that?

Dr Christie: I would change the road environment and put in measures but it is absolutely key to speak to the community all the time. I would see what could be done to change the environment where people live, reduce vehicle speed and flow, create more play areas for children that are safe. Many parents say that when they take their children to the park it is inhabited by teenagers drinking, drug use, dogs roaming around and lots of litter, and that is if they have a play space nearby. Neighbourhood policing is part of the community to whom people feel they can turn. When you talk to parents in these areas they say that they feel intimidated by going to the council offices to discuss matters. They say that there used to be a neighbourhood office but there is no longer.

Q20 Clive Efford: That does not have much to do with driving?

Dr Christie: Exactly, but all these are wider matters than traffic.

Q21 Mr Martlew: Basically you are saying that road safety is too important for the Ministry for Transport, that it goes far beyond that. Mr Lynam said that you have to convince the public to do something. When we talk about children, obviously we have a bad record. I brought a Private Member's Bill to try to make young cyclists wear helmets. I have never been so vilified in all my life by the CTC. Unfortunately, I found that the Department for Transport was aiding and abetting them. In a way, road safety, passenger safety and children's safety are not high on the priorities of the Department for Transport. Is that your view?

Mr Lynam: My answer would be that it is high on their priorities, but whether they have the solutions for it is another matter. If we can look at the comparison, because we have already said that some countries are doing better than ours, what is happening in those countries? One of the difficulties we see in Britain rather more so than in some of those countries is that generally traffic flows on average right across towns are much higher in Britain. It is a lot easier in the Netherlands and in Sweden to develop a town structure which separates the residential areas and puts intensive measures on those, keeps traffic out of them, keeps traffic slow, and then have a smaller number of main routes on which the traffic can be concentrated with rather different policies. It is far more difficult to do with the structure of British towns and the amount of traffic in British towns.

Q22 Mrs Ellman: I would like to ask you about the official road casualty statistics. Do you think that there is serious under-reporting and, if so, in which areas?

Mr Lynam: Clearly we feel that in terms of slight injuries there has been such a major change in the numbers that we believe, yes, there is a clear change in reporting of those. What is a lot more difficult to determine is what is happening within the serious group. We know there is this divergence between serious accident trends and fatal accident trends. We have looked particularly at fatalities and we have identified small areas where there has been a greater tendency for fatal injury, due to some of the policies and the way in which for example vehicles have changed and so on over recent years. Clearly there is something more than that going on. There has been a number of studies trying to link hospital-based data with police‑based data that shows discrepancies and we ourselves at TRL have been looking at Scottish hospital in-patient data in a database. Clearly, there seem to be some differences occurring there. I do not think we have yet nailed those down.

Q23 Chairman: Are they differences of definition or of recording?

Mr Lynam: I think they may be due to both. Once you start talking about hospital in-patients, then there clearly are potential differences in the way in which hospitals have dealt with patients over the last 10 years, but not enough I suspect to account for the sorts of changes we are talking about. Yes, there is some change in the way the police are reporting the severity of the injuries. Police reporting of severity injury is not an exact science.

Chairman: We sort of suspected that.

Q24 Mrs Ellman: Are there any other views on the under-reporting of accidents? Are there any particular areas where you think there is under-reporting, perhaps in slight accidents or perhaps accidents involving single vehicles?

Professor Dorling: You see this more widely in the reporting of violence, which is not to do with traffic at all. There are widening discrepancies between police figures on violence and hospital episode statistics and so on. There is a wider discrepancy than just simply transport and what is going on with the recording of damage done by violence.

Q25 Mrs Ellman: What about the distinction between serious and slight injuries, if that is a distinction acceptable on the definitions map?

Mr Lynam: I do not think it is a helpful distinction. Certainly it is a different distinction than most other countries use. We have a much broader category of 'serious'. That makes it more difficult for us to focus strongly on the really severe accidents, even if we used the 'killed and serious' category because we are including quite a number at the lower end of that which are less severe. If indeed there is a change in reporting policy that is occurring, we want that moved towards a rather better definition of what are the more severe accidents. Of course what it does in the short term is present us with a problem in any trend analysis. In the future, because any such casualty targeting has to relate to numbers of casualties, we need to be very sure about what our definition is and that it will be consistent over a long period of time.

Q26 Mrs Ellman: There has been a much bigger reduction in serious injuries compared with fatalities over the last 10 years. Is there any explanation for that?

Mr Lynam: As I have said, we have seen a number of small areas where fatalities seem to be more likely now than they were in the past. When one thinks about vehicles, there is increasing separation between larger vehicles and smaller vehicles and impact between those two gives a greater likelihood of a fatal outcome. There are indications of worsening behaviour in the sense that we can see more single vehicle run-off accidents, and they are typically due to excessive speed. There are changes of that sort that appear to be implied by some of the changes that we are seeing. That is only explaining a portion of the difference that we see.

Dr Christie: Seat belt wearing is a major problem because only 11 per cent of fatally injured passengers were wearing a seat belt. It is a very low figure.

Q27 Mrs Ellman: Would there be any benefit in changing to the fatality equivalent as used in road accidents?

Mr Lynam: If you are going to move to that, you must have a factor on which you are deciding. If you are going to create a fatality equivalent, why not have a fatality? If you are simply multiplying the number of fatalities by a factor, then the numbers that you are recording are the fatality numbers anyway. In a direct sense, that does not really help you. Where it might help you and where we tried for example on some of the assessment programmes is to look for some factors that are characteristic of groups of roads - for example motorway factors and major rural road factors - which we can look at from a national level but then apply those down when we are looking at the local roads, so that we are able to look at 'killed and serious' and turn those into fatal equivalents for comparing individual roads. There are ways that you can use that sort of concept but as a national figure, I do not think it gives you anything more than purely fatality figures.

Q28 David Simpson: You mentioned earlier about the Dutch and the Dutch concept of a safe, sustainable transport system which argues for a systematic approach to safety management and the removal of risk, removing the potential for human error. Could that be achieved in Great Britain? If you think it could, what would we need to do to achieve it?

Mr Lynam: The principles behind that, which are basically relatively the same as those behind the Swedish zero vision type approach, suggest then that you are looking, as you say, for the areas of risk and for ways to eliminate those. The difference is a matter of degree; in other words, whether you try to eliminate 100% of them or 95% or 90% or whatever. If you look at those sorts of principles, then the policies that Britain has put in place are based on similar sorts of principles. The issue is the extent to which those principles have been applied. We see in the Swedish situation, for example, that they have a large proportion of head‑on accidents. As you will know, they have typically gone for a programme of putting safety fences down the centre of single-carriageway roads and said, "We will simply prevent that process". If you try to transfer that policy into Britain, because the road structure in Britain is rather different and we do not have these long stretches with small numbers of junctions that the Swedes have, in Britain we have a much more interactive and dense network, it is more difficult to achieve that and we have to look at the costs of doing it. At the same time, if we look at the proportion of accidents in Britain, we do not have the same number of head-on accidents. When you look at the policies, it does not quite work out but if you look at the general principles, yes, I would agree that the sort of vision that we want to develop is one which is similar to those sorts of visions, but set within a British context.

Q29 Mr Hollobone: I would like to ask my last question first, so that you all have time to think about it. That is going to be: if you were an all-powerful prime minister and you could do whatever you wanted, what three things would you do to improve road safety? In the meantime, I would like to ask each of you some individual questions. Mr Lynam, on the statistics - this is for those of us who are slower than others so that we can get a grasp of the context of this - how many people are killed on Britain's roads every year?

Mr Lynam: It changes year by year fortunately, but not by a very large amount. It is round about 3,200 at the moment. I am not sure of the exact figure for 2007.

Q30 Mr Hollobone: How many of those 3,200 are vehicle-on-vehicle deaths as opposed to pedestrian deaths?

Mr Lynam: Pedestrian deaths are somewhere in the order of 20%. Vehicle occupant deaths are of the order of 60%, but some of those will simply be single vehicles running off the road, so that is not purely vehicle-on-vehicle. The largest proportion in terms of vehicles, is vehicle running into vehicle. That is why, if I can spend a moment on this, the vehicle safety industry and the research into vehicles safety focuses very much on vehicle-to-vehicle contact. All the work in the 1990s was to improve secondary safety. It is now looking more at the issue of vehicles running off the road and hitting things off the road or the infrastructure, signs and so on. We are looking for compatibility between the vehicle design and the road design to ensure that the passiveness is taken out one way or the other, and so we are getting more passive infrastructure as well as more passively safe cars.

Q31 Mr Hollobone: About 600 pedestrians a year are killed on our roads. What proportion of those 600 are children?

Dr Christie: I think it is about 120.

Mr Hollobone: Within that 120, what is the age breakdown?

Q32 Chairman: I think you will find that is done by definition anyway because a child is defined by its age up to whatever.

Mr Lynam: It is 0 to 16 and there will be a higher proportion of 11 to 15 than there are under 11.

Q33 Mr Hollobone: So more than half would be over 11?

Mr Lynam: I think so.

Mr Hollobone: In terms of very young children, we are talking about 60 or fewer young children killed on our roads every year, roughly?

Q34 Chairman: In Great Britain, 15 of 0 to 14 are cyclists; 56 of 0 to 14 are pedestrians. I think that is the figure you want.

Mr Lynam: Then your estimate was very good.

Mr Hollobone: To be clear, this is child pedestrians, not in vehicles, on the side of the road, dying basically because they are hit by vehicles.

Chairman: The normal way to define a pedestrian is that they are not in a vehicle.

Q35 Mr Hollobone: I wanted to check that I was up to speed with what we are being told. Professor Dorling, I was interested in what you were saying about treating this issue as a public health issue. To settle this in context, given that 3,200 people are dying on Britain's roads every year, how does that compare to some of the headline diseases and conditions that all of us will have heard about in terms of fatalities every year?

Professor Dorling: I will tell you what I think is the case and I would be very happy to give you better figures later if you require it. Once a child has reached the age of about 11/2, I think they have gone past most of the major risks of being an infant. At that point, apart from a few rare cancers, from then onwards you are beginning to see the roads becoming more and more dangerous. Once a child gets past the age of 11 or 12, as far as I am aware I think it is the major risk factor for children. It does not decrease probably until the late 20s when the major risk factor is suicide and the roads are second to that. I can give you accurate figures later if you want them. You then go on quite a long time before you start to get to my age when your body begins to break up and other normal things begin to matter. For a large section of our healthiest young people the major risk factor is the roads and then after that is their own mental health.

Q36 Mr Hollobone: To make sure that I have this right, we are saying that with the 60 or so child pedestrians being killed ---

Professor Dorling: Clearly there are the ones in the cars as well and the ones on bicycles and so on.

Q37 Mr Hollobone: How many children are we counting in cars?

Professor Dorling: If you want accurate figures, I am happy to supply them. Our environment has become incredibly safe in other ways. For instance, the way we can now treat leukaemia, all these improvements in health have meant that, relatively speaking, this risk looks bigger and bigger, even though it is absolutely smaller. As we care about our children as much as we ever did, this becomes in our minds a bigger and bigger risk because it is increasingly the major risk.

Q38 Mr Hollobone: From age 11 and upwards until the end of childhood, the risk of death on our roads is bigger than any other single medical condition?

Professor Dorling: Yes.

Q39 Mr Hollobone: Which other countries have decided to pursue road safety as a public health issue?

Professor Dorling: In effect it is a public health issue in Sweden and in the Netherlands far more than us, but remember we are doing well at this game. I suspect there was a similar discussion here, not in this room but in a room very like it, 150 years ago when somebody in your position said, when another country decided to see our sewerage system as a public health issue, that we can have privies in backyards and what is wrong with that. There will be one country that does it first. This is a major killer. WHO sees it as a public health issue and it lists the major 20 killers in the world; roads come high up the list with one million people a year dying on the roads in the world and rising, so it is one every 30 seconds.

Q40 Mr Hollobone: Those two countries you mention, Sweden and the Netherlands, pursuing road safety as a public health issue have amongst the best road safety in the world.

Professor Dorling: Yes, but this is one of the things we are very good at. Rather than be complacent about the fact that we are generally good at it, somebody has to be the best, so why not aim to try to be the best and treat it as a public health issue in the first batch of countries, rather than be in the position that we are often in of being in the last batch of countries.

Q41 Mr Hollobone: Of the three of our distinguished panellists here, are any of you in favour of a dedicated yellow school bus scheme like they run in the United States?

Dr Christie: Schools do have dedicated bus schemes that are trialled at various counties. My children use one, so they are available now. They are not yellow buses but they are dedicated school buses.

Q42 Mr Hollobone: Do you think if there was greater provision of dedicated school buses, perhaps along the lines of the yellow bus scheme in the States, that would make a significant improvement to children's road safety?

Dr Christie: I think any improvement in public transport would help, without a doubt, but it has to be affordable. I think it is very expensive, so I think that would need to be considered. There is some evidence from the Eighties - you will be talking to Professor Allsop later - with the Fares Fair scheme where fares were reduced in London and the casualty rate dropped.

Q43 Mr Hollobone: Before I come to the last question, which I warned you about at the beginning, I want to ask all of you about the two million uninsured/untaxed vehicles on Britain's roads. Were those taken off Britain's roads, would that make a significant difference to road safety?

Dr Christie: They do feature disproportionately in accidents.

Mr Lynam: My view is that it is a growing problem and an important problem for us to tackle.

Dr Christie: I would say that if you think about the car, getting access to tuition is expensive; cars are expensive; insurance is phenomenally expensive for young men, and it is about £2000 to insure a young man. If you cannot afford to drive, then we are creating a bigger problem of unlicensed driving. I think this also relates to injury risk in deprived areas.

Q44 Mr Hollobone: My last question is: if you were an all-powerful prime minister and you could do what you wanted to do, briefly what three things would you do to improve road safety?

Professor Dorling: The first thing I would do would be to encourage an environment whereby some of our largest cities could become majority 20 mph. areas like Amsterdam and the Hague. The second thing I would do would be to make information on the dangers of roads the responsibly of the Minister of Public Health. The third thing I would do would be to force the Health and Safety Executive to investigate deaths on the road and the deaths of people who are driving while at work.

Dr Christie: I would ensure that there was capacity to deliver the engineering. At the moment there is not the capacity. I would make sure that there are enough trained transport planners and engineers to be able to deliver the whole programme of engineering. I would reduce fares on public transport substantially, perhaps even make it free in deprived areas. I agree that there needs to be massive environmental change to make things safe for people to walk.

Mr Lynam: What I would like to be done first is what President Chirac did a few years ago and say that road safety is a key national priority to improve. That made a huge difference in France. Secondly, the issues about drink driving have foundered very much at the upper levels of government in the past and some announcement from the Prime Minister that he would like to see changes in terms of policies towards drink driving would be extremely welcome. There are other areas like speeding which could also be fruitful. The third one, as has been said before, is the availability of funds to change the road structure to one that we really want over a period of time.

Q45 Clive Efford: Do we have enforcement right?

Dr Christie: I do not think so. I do not think there are enough dedicated traffic police who are mixing in the communities and talking with people and understanding the road safety problems in their areas.

Mr Lynam: You have to be clear about what enforcement is really for. To me enforcement should work on the minority of people who are not prepared to obey and comply with laws that are accepted by the majority of people. One of the problems with enforcement is that you need to ensure this public debate, the public acceptance, of the sorts of policies you are putting in place in order to create that situation where you are focusing enforcement on the minority.

Q46 Clive Efford: Are you suggesting more focused enforcement but more draconian measures for those people who defy the rules?

Mr Lynam: No, I am suggesting for example with things like speeding and drink driving that there needs to be publicity and education and a process of convincing people of the importance of road safety and of measures being applied in those areas. That is not just a one-way track; it is not a matter of you standing up and saying, "This is what should be done because this is my view of priorities". It is a question of having a convincing debate about what should be the social values going into the future.

Q47 Clive Efford: Does that go back to instruction at the time that people learn to drive or earlier than that?

Mr Lynam: If you talk to educationalists, they will tell you that attitudes start forming very early on and you can work right through the period of 10 or 11 upwards, well before you get to driving age, to try and influence responsible attitudes. Carrying over those attitudes into adulthood is where we begin to see a breakdown, and so much more effort needs to be focused on convincing young adults particularly, but society generally, about the value of improving safety.

Q48 Clive Efford: Do you favour enforcement through extra police or do you think we should do more to put in actual physical barriers on our road networks to ensure that drivers are forced to comply with speed restrictions and other restrictions on the roads?

Mr Lynam: There is an interesting thing about physical barriers in terms of the road structure. I did a lot of work in the Seventies developing urban networks of that sort. Essentially, it was taking old grid-patterned networks and putting some limitations on the sorts of trips that people could make. They could only go out of one end of a street rather than the other end. There was tremendous resistance to that and yet at the same time the estates that were being built were being built to planning principles that clearly did not allow the same sort of movement. They had similar options for movement as we were trying to create in these areas. I do not see anything wrong with turning an estate into that shape but you have to do it in consultation; you have to explain what you are doing and convince people that they are not getting a raw deal out of it,

Q49 Clive Efford: That does not deal with the issue of speed, though, does it?

Mr Lynam: If you look at modern estate layouts, they are built so that speed is not attractive and indeed cannot be obtained. You have small sections, constant turns, you do not have straight through rat-runs.

Q50 Chairman: While every television programme about motor cars emphasises speed, how are you going to change that atmosphere, that idea? I think it was the present Mayor of London who said that to get a 20 m.p.h. restriction on the residential areas in London alone would take 30 years. That is always provided that people accepted that restriction. What can you really do that would change the atmosphere?

Mr Lynam: When we looked at drink driving and that same sort of question, there was a development in attempting to change attitudes. It started off with the concept that you needed to convince people there was a risk, and then people were quite happy to take that on board but it was other people's behaviour that was at risk, not theirs, and so you have to convince them that it is their behaviour that is at risk. Then they have a trade-off as to whether they accept that or not. Then, what are the penalties or rewards in complying with that?

Q51 Clive Efford: I was going to ask about 20 m.p.h. zones. When I tried to suggest 20 mph. zones, the police turned round and said that unless it is physically imposed on people by speed bumps, they will not comply with it, and therefore they will not support it being introduced because it cannot be enforced. What is your attitude to residential areas being turned into 20 mph. zones as a minimum?

Mr Lynam: My view is that we should turn a lot more of the residential zones into 20 mph. areas. Again, it is something which has been done particularly in the Netherlands and also in Sweden. It has contributed to their reductions. Going back in history, when we first started trying to restrict speeds in areas, it was done simply by putting up signs. Drivers did not comply with those signs, and hence the need to put in physical obstructions. I think now we are moving more and more to a situation where people have become used to the idea of travelling more slowly because of the physical obstructions and there may be scope for reducing them. It is something you have to do in concert with the people who are living there. If people do not reduce speeds without the physical obstruction, the obstruction has to be in place.

Q52 Clive Efford: Your opinion would be that 20 mph. zones should not require physical barriers and restrictions?

Mr Lynam: That is the ideal but there are not many places that have managed to achieve that. Again, if you look at the Dutch situation, they started off with quite a complex set of humps and changes to the road structure and subsequently went for a less dense structure but still having a number of these physical deterrents present.

Q53 Mrs Ellman: What percentage of fatal accidents would you say are the result of deliberate risk taking rather than mistakes?

Mr Lynam: It is very difficult to define. I do not think I would like to come up with a number. There is certainly a large proportion of single vehicle accidents. How deliberate you suggest that is, if it is clearly a situation where there is only one vehicle that is involved, then it is a loss of control. I do not think anybody sets out to have an accident as a result of risk taking, and so it is a matter of degree. If you look at single vehicle accidents, they can make up maybe 20% of car accidents and certainly that sort of number of motor cycle accidents.

Dr Christie: When you look at the proportion of young people involved in fatal traffic accidents, speed and alcohol and lack of seat belt wearing are major contributory factors to fatalities. There are some very big issues around that

Q54 Mrs Ellman: What level of risk should we be aiming for?

Dr Christie: As someone who contributed to the PACT report, the whole gist that is proposed in there is to have a risk that is not more than twice the risk of injury doing any everyday activity. I am not quite sure what that means but that is the theory.

Mr Lynam: It is very difficult to put a level of that sort and say that is what we should aim for.

Q55 Chairman: Except that Professor Dorling made the point earlier on that if you are really going to be 100% safe, you do not let people out at all. You have your children on leads.

Mr Lynam: I made the point earlier that you have to balance it with the other transport objectives: access, visibility, exposure, mobility and so on. There is a balance to be achieved. Personally, I prefer a level of risk looking a little more at that balance than simply plucking a number out of the air. It has to be said that it is perfectly valid to look at other activities and ask what the risk is in the other activities and why should we have a risk that is any higher than those other activities.

Q56 Mrs Ellman: Do you think there is an area where the public would not accept what they saw as restrictions on their freedom in the name of safety? Do you think there is a limit?

Professor Dorling: There always is but it changes. If you are talking about smoking in the 1950s, you would never have imagined the regime we have about smoking now. The point is that you lead the public as well as listening to what they say and you have to move things forward. Also, I think the public in the Netherlands have a much better idea about risks than the public here because of the way society in the Netherlands educates their children better perhaps than we do, and because of what is shown on our television, which I do not think would be acceptable in the Netherlands. Some people have to lead. Parliament is part of that. You move people with you.

Q57 Mr Scott: How robust to you think the benefit cost calculations for road safety engineering programmes are?

Mr Lynam: I think they are robust relatively speaking to other cost effective calculations. There is a difference between a full cost benefit analysis and so I am not quite sure which you are looking at. Cost benefit has to take in a lot of other factors which do not necessary have monetary values to them, and that then creates a difficulty in making those sums work, but if you look at the pure cost effectiveness, then I think they are robust. The evidence for engineering measures, as Dr Christie mentioned earlier, is far easier to get at and far stronger because of the numbers that we are dealing with and the very large number of situations you need to monitor than the evidence for progressive policies like education and training.

Q58 Mr Scott: Do you think more lateral thinking and action is needed to tackle road safety problems and than is currently being carried out?

Mr Lynam: That is what I was intimating right at the beginning when I said that some other countries have taken more of a step forward. As we said, we were certainly up with the leaders in 2000; we are now lagging behind a bit. That is because some of these other countries have taken much more substantive steps in their thinking at least and they are trying to put that into implementation as well.

Professor Dorling: I would make one point about cost benefit calculations. They were designed at a time when we were a poorer country. In a sense, you can argue now that we have reached a level of affluence on average, although we are very unequal, whereby you could look at what we value in life and decide things a little differently than the cost benefit analysis that was done in the past. As other risks have decreased and as we have come to a point where we can heat our houses and we all have colour televisions and so on, that alters how we think about these things. That is partly why other countries are moving forward because they are valuing having a better environment more highly than they did in the past because we have become richer. If we become richer and cannot make our streets safer, in a sense, what was the point?

Dr Christie: Lateral thinking is very important in the deprived areas where you have to look at the root causes of road traffic injury. That might be because there are not many safe play areas or there is nothing for children to do. It is important to think about those issues. It is not necessary a road safety solution.

Chairman: On that positive and useful note, may I thank you all. It has been very interesting. Thank you very much indeed.

Memorandum submitted by the Association of British Insurers

Examination of Witnesses

Witnesses: Professor Richard Allsop, OBE, Professor of Transport Studies, and Ms Heather Ward, Honorary Senior Research Fellow, University College London; and Mr Nick Starling, Director of General Insurance and Health, Association of British Insurers, gave evidence.

Q59 Chairman: Good afternoon to you all. Can I thank you for coming, firstly? This is an important inquiry and it is one that we take very seriously indeed. Would you be kind enough to identify yourselves for the record, please?

Mr Starling: My name is Nick Starling. I am director of general insurance and health at the Association of British Insurers. I am also a trustee of the Parliamentary Advisory Council on Transport Safety.

Ms Ward: I am Heather Ward. I am an honorary senior research fellow at University College London. I have been in the field of road safety research for the past 30 years.

Professor Allsop: I am Richard Allsop. I am emeritus professor of transport studies at University College London. I have worked on road safety research in various forms for 40-odd years and I am also a director of PACTS and of the European Transport Safety Council.

Q60 Chairman: It is very nice that PACTS is so fully represented today. As you will realise, our adviser on this particular inquiry is also not unrelated to the PACTS organisation which we regard as a very useful form of parliamentary support services. Do any of you have anything you want to say before we start, briefly? No. You are all looking very well disciplined. Tell me the main role of government in relation to road safety.

Ms Ward: The main role of government, like your previous panel of witnesses, is to lead by example, to take a political lead. Those countries where there has been a sustained political lead are doing very well indeed.

Professor Allsop: In addition, to draw together the inputs. There are many stakeholders in road safety, people with responsibilities for the roads, for vehicles in various ways, for operations using the roads and representing interests of different groups, concerned with education and training and public health as influenced by what happens on the roads. Many organisations have a contribution to make. Some of them already recognise this explicitly. Others perhaps need to be encouraged to recognise it more fully and government can help to identify synergies between these contributions and bring them together and, where there are tensions between them, to try to resolve them positively.

Mr Starling: I would agree that leadership is the absolute key. I think it is extremely important to work closely with other organisations and also to work in areas where the objectives might be slightly different but the outcomes are the same. For example, if you sort out road safety, you sort out a lot of issues round the health service, as previous witnesses were saying. You improve the environment for people, so if you can align different interests to the same end then I think you can begin to win in these sorts of areas.

Q61 Mrs Ellman: What measures have been most effective in reducing casualties since 2000?

Professor Allsop: Engineering of the roads, in the light of the capabilities of the road users, people on foot as well as users of vehicles, is a large contributor. Occupant protection and pedestrian protection by vehicles influencing how much injury results from a given collision is a large contributor. Also, traffic law influencing behaviour of drivers and persuading and influencing the behaviour of drivers, especially in terms of drink, choice of speed and wearing of seat belts.

Q62 Chairman: Mr Starling, are there any special groups that cause you more trouble?

Mr Starling: From our point of view, personal injury claims are going up so from a purely insurance point of view we are not seeing reductions.

Q63 Chairman: Is that because there is a different atmosphere in terms of litigation or is that because there are more accidents in the groups that you deal with? What do you personally, in your organisation, think is the reason for an increase?

Mr Starling: We do not know. We know that there is this increase. In the last ten years, bodily injury claims have gone up by about 3%. The costs of bodily injury claims have gone up by about 6.5% a year so the costs are rising and the numbers are rising. There may be a number of factors in this. People are more aware of what they can do in terms of claims. There are more people who are acting on behalf of claimants. We know that a lot of the increase is in very light injury claims, whiplash in particular. There might be an issue around people being encouraged to claim for whiplash. That is what we see, so the strict answer to your question, "What has worked best in the last few years?" is we do not know because things seem to be getting worse. We do know where we have the most concerns. We have huge concerns around young drivers. There is carnage among young drivers and there are other groups where there are problems: older drivers, foreign drivers, uninsured drivers where action is starting to be taken. We are getting there. There is still a little bit more to do. The key issue is identifying those risks, working with others to sort them.

Q64 Mrs Ellman: Have speed cameras saved lives?

Professor Allsop: Yes. The best estimate is about 100 lives a year. We have more or less levelled out at a number of speed cameras of the order of 7,000 I think over the network. In terms of support for that through evidence of changing behaviour, we have seen the average speed of vehicles in free flowing traffic on 30 and 40 mile an hour road decrease steadily throughout the period when the number of speed cameras has been built up and the percentage of people driving over the limit on those roads is also decreasing steadily. There are still a lot of people driving over the limit but it is about half in free flowing traffic on 30 mile an hour roads. It was about two thirds before we had speed cameras.

Ms Ward: They have been demonstrated to have saved lives but only on specific parts of the road network where the greatest concern is on the rural network, where the speeds are much higher and there is much less use of speed cameras in rural areas than there is in urban areas. A lot of the gains have been made in towns and cities but there is a much higher proportion of deaths on the rural network than on the urban road network these days, especially amongst car occupants.

Q65 Mrs Ellman: Has there been any reduction in roads policing in relation to drivers breaking traffic regulations? Has there been a reduction of enforcement on the roads?

Professor Allsop: I believe that there has been over the 1990s and into this century a reduction in police presence in that less police officer time has been allocated to patrolling on the roads.

Ms Ward: That is my understanding as well. It is a concern amongst those of us working in road safety that there does seem to have been a reduction in the number of police present on the road network, which is increasing the levels of bad behaviour such as was mentioned earlier, the use of mobile phones, speeding, drink driving, drug taking, etc. The perceived risk of being stopped is very low. What we need to do is to raise the perceived risk of being stopped, not necessarily the real risk of being stopped. People need to think that they are going to be stopped by the police a lot more often than they actually are. The higher we can raise the level that you think you are going to be stopped, the more effective the enforcement becomes.

Q66 Chairman: On the M6 for example the police had very clear evidence that there were people travelling from large conurbations, from Liverpool and Manchester, into our areas because they were easier and were perceived as not being so well protected. There was a very great deal of publicity about the automatic number plate reading and all the other things that would normally be very effective forms of enforcement. I think it may have worked probably for a week but the Liverpool villains who are very professional are only impressed for what I may call a short period of time. What evidence have you that there is this change?

Mr Starling: You mentioned automatic number plate recognition and I think that is a success area in enforcement in the last few years. Well over 100,000 vehicles were stopped and some of them were crushed. That has been successful. As you pointed out, some police forces do it more than others. I think it does demonstrate what I said earlier, that if you can get people's objectives aligned you get action because we are obviously interested in stopping uninsured drivers. They rip off our honest customers. The Department for Transport would like to stop them because they are disproportionately dangerous, very much so, but the police also found that when they stopped uninsured drivers they were committing other offences. That is the example of people with different motivations wanting to do the same thing and you are beginning to get action.

Chairman: I should not upset these Liverpool Members. I apologise if I suggested only Liverpool has professional villains. I know of other cities that do quite well as well.

Q67 Mrs Ellman: What should the priorities be over, say, the next ten years? What are the categories of people particularly at risk? I know, Mr Starling, you mentioned young drivers. Are there any groups where you think attention should be directed?

Ms Ward: There is a mounting level of evidence about the risk of those involved in road traffic accidents, young people in particular, who are without employment. When we talk about this rise in uninsured and unlicensed driving, it is most prevalent in these more disadvantaged groups. There are more injuries in these groups and there is a lack of seatbelt wearing. The figure that Dr Christie mentioned earlier of 11% is 11% of young, male, rear seat passengers at night that were killed. Only 11% were found to be wearing a seatbelt. Seatbelt wearing amongst young people in particular at night and young men in particular is an absolute number one priority for saving lives because not wearing a seatbelt is implicated in head injuries. If you have a head injury, you are far less likely to survive than if you do not have a head injury. Anything that we can do to reduce the number of head injuries, either in car or outside of car, is going to bring forth major benefits over the next few years.

Q68 Clive Efford: What assessment do you make of public opinion towards the government's road safety strategy?

Professor Allsop: We know that a large percentage - I think it is in the 70% to 80% range - would like the alcohol limit lowered and would like more enforcement against drink driving. We know that a large percentage of the population, including a considerable majority of drivers, approves of speed cameras and their use. Man local groups ask for additional cameras in their areas. We know from the research that has been carried out into the impact of the department's Think campaign that attitudes to excessive speed have shifted considerably. The proportion of people who are asked on a five point scale how badly they see exceeding the speed limit, the percentage who see it as a very serious matter, is considerably higher. These are examples of positive perceptions of aspects of the programme. I do not know of research that has asked the general question of how people perceive the road safety policy. I do not know whether my colleagues know.

Mr Starling: We have made no formal assessment but the big issue for us at the moment is young drivers. When we published our research and started our campaign on young drivers 18 months ago, we found the publish response astonishing in terms of political support, public support and press support. That is a good indication that we have shared concerns with the public. That also meant that there was public support for the sort of proposals we had around testing, training, age when you can drive, the number of passengers and so forth. We have not gone out and tested that but we thought that was a good indication to us of how seriously people take it.

Q69 Clive Efford: Do you think we should be worried about sections of the media and groups who actively campaign against road safety measures such as cameras and speed limit enforcement?

Ms Ward: In a democratic society, all views have their place. One of the problems that I see from these groups is that they are disproportionately vocal according to the size of the membership that they purport to have on board. From that point of view, I think the amount of media attention that they are able to garner is out of all proportion to the size of their membership.

Q70 Clive Efford: Name names.

Ms Ward: My main concern I think, having been involved quite a lot in the speed camera programme, is the Association of British Drivers who seem to have rather a lot of ears of a lot of very influential people, again out of proportion to the size of their membership. That is my personal view.

Chairman: One that I might concur with, if I can be non-controversial.

Clive Efford: What percentage of fatal accidents are the result of deliberate risk taking? How many are the result of mistakes or accidental factors?

Q71 Chairman: Mr Starling, do you want to make a guess?

Mr Starling: I am not going to make any sort of guess. The issue is not really deliberate risk taking. It is being unaware of risk and not knowing the limitations, which comes back once again to the issue of young drivers. We know that they will be in accidents which involve speed, losing control of the car. As I think other witnesses have said, no one actually sets out to drive a car off a bend or across a central reservation but your actions can lead to that. There is also the mates factor. That is, the friends in the back. One of the things we have found is that quite often you will have a law abiding young driver. They have not drunk anything but they are driving their mates back from a party and that is when the accidents occur. It is nothing deliberate. They have been egged on. There is excitement in the car and that is a concern.

Clive Efford: What level of risk should we be aiming for?

Q72 Chairman: I know we keep returning to this but it is important.

Professor Allsop: My calculation of the risk we tolerate over use of the roads is leaving aside one other, big area of risk which is the risk of fatal falls to very elderly people in their homes. If we leave aside that area, the ratio of the risk of death per hour when we are using the roads to the risk that we tolerate in the rest of every day life is about eight to one. This relates to your previous question about the media and these groups who challenge safety measures. If we had a wider public understanding and perhaps a wider understanding in the very high levels of responsibility for the content of our newspapers and television of this disproportion and thereby rationale for measures that try to reduce this, we might help things forward. In terms of where to go, my pragmatic vision is a road system in which we tolerate no higher risk there than elsewhere in every day life. I do not think that we should lead the public to expect that, just as I do not think we should lead the public to contemplate that there could be a road transport system with no risk of death or serious injury, which some of our European neighbours do claim to aim for. I do not think we should lead the public to expect that because, if we are going to use mechanised transport, we are accelerating our bodies to speeds from which we have not evolved to be slowed down suddenly. There will be some risks as long as we have mechanised transport. As long as we have mechanised transport which is open for all of us as individuals to use, as is the case with the road system, we have to reconcile ourselves to there being somewhat higher risk there than we expect to find elsewhere in every day life, but perhaps as a long term target a factor of two.

Q73 Chairman: If we did not have human beings in charge of cars, we would not have a problem?

Professor Allsop: Yes. If we had sufficiently intelligent and reliable automata, we would have less of a problem.

Chairman: I think we are into Utopia there. If car drivers were tested on their IQ before they got behind the wheel, life would be very interesting. There would be fewer cars on the road.

Q74 Clive Efford: What can we learn from other countries about tackling drink drive problems?

Ms Ward: The Australians have taken this very seriously and, at the same time they have brought in a massive speed camera programme, they have brought in a massive drink drive campaign with random stopping of motorists. Their vision of a road system is that you can be stopped anywhere, any time. Again, this comes back to my point, in increasing the level of perception in the mind of the driver that you are likely to be stopped. Whether or not the level of stopping changes is slightly another matter but if people believe they are going to be stopped it is my belief that they do start to think more about their behaviour and it impacts more on certain people than others. There is always a class of person who does not care. They do not bow to authority in any way at all, so there will always be people who drink drive and there will always be people who speed, no matter what level of enforcement we have. The majority want to comply and the majority will believe that, if they are going to be caught, they will stop drink driving.

Mr Starling: May I make a general observation? There is a lot we can learn from other countries. To some extent, the fact that we have slipped down the rankings helps a little bit because sometimes the attitude before was: we do best; why should we learn? We have not done specific work on drink driving. We have some very interesting statistics on the number of passengers in cars relating to accidents. For example, other countries have done it, so I think that this is an area where you can learn very much from what other countries have done, even if they started from a higher base than we have.

Professor Allsop: Several of our successful European neighbours' police do have the power to stop and test. I prefer not to use the word "random" myself but led by their intelligence as to where there are most likely to be drinking drivers which police forces have a pretty shrewd idea about, they should have the power then to stop and ask for a breath sample without any prior suspicion that the person has been drinking. That has been called the unfettered discretion to test and in Sweden and the Netherlands the police have those powers. They need the equipment and here, in the Serious Crime Act, just before the last election which means three years ago, we created the power for evidential roadside breath testing. The reason that is not yet happening is that the Home Office has not yet completed type approval procedure for the equipment to enable it to happen. The difference it will make is that a crew that is put on the road by a chief constable in an evening - at the moment the first offender over the limit that they find takes them off the road for the rest of the relevant period because they have to go back to the station. If they could do procedures at the roadside, they could deal with that in perhaps half an hour or an hour and then they could catch two more people. That is a big difference.

Q75 Chairman: What is the objection? Is it that they have not technically got the evidential system right or is it just that the police forces and the Home Office are not enforcing it?

Professor Allsop: The Home Office are taking a long time to carry out this procedure. You would need to ask them exactly why, but I cannot believe that if it were a really high priority it needed to have taken more than a year at the outside, because these equipments are approved in other countries. It is not new research. It is approving pieces of equipment which are in use in other countries for use here and I think it is a very serious matter that they have delayed this.

Chairman: That is helpful. You may take it we will be asking questions.

Q76 Clive Efford: How big is the problem of drug driving and what should we do about it?

Professor Allsop: The measurements we have are that on Thursday, Friday and Saturday evenings and into the early hours of Friday, Saturday and Sunday about 1% of people are driving around over the limit. About half of those are very seriously over the limit. There is probably another 2% in the range 50 to 80 who would be over the limit if we had the European recommended limit. They are contributing 550 or so deaths per year. Those evenings are the peak. There are other times of the week when there are also contributions.

Q77 Chairman: It is the drug taking that we are concerned about, both recreational and medicinal.

Ms Ward: I cannot answer your question directly with figures but a colleague and I have been undertaking work in the west of England interviewing, as it happens, 16 year old moped drivers, again who are a big problem group that are not quite recognised to the extent that they should be. The attitude of the 100 or so young people that we interviewed in the west of England is that they have maybe one drink and then stop, because they know they are not supposed to drink and drive. Then they move on to drugs because they think that is safe. The perception amongst young people, it appears, is that driving with drugs is perfectly okay but driving whilst drinking is not okay.

Q78 Clive Efford: How important is the quality of emergency services and hospital A&E care in reducing crashes? What impact has that had on the comparability of international data?

Ms Ward: We have looked in one of our pieces of work for the Department for Transport at ambulance response times over the last decade. The main indicator that we have looked at is the speed at which the ambulance conveys the injured person to hospital. That does not seem to have changed in terms of travel time. Obviously the way that ambulances are sent to a road traffic accident has changed over time because they now have category A and category B ambulances. If it is considered to be serious, an ambulance that is fully equipped with paramedics on board is generally sent out. In the same piece of work, it emerges that about 80% of deaths occur before admission to hospital. Those people that are killed in road traffic accidents tend to die very quickly indeed, before admission obviously. That means that they can be alive as they are going through the A&E department and alive as they are going into theatre for surgery. That does not count as admission. The admission comes after that. It is just quite a small proportion of the deaths that go into hospital and are treated there. Also, we have looked at not so much the treatment in the A&E department but the treatment of injured people. As I mentioned earlier, your chances of survival, of coming out of hospital alive as it were, with a head injury, are substantially lower than coming out of hospital with injury to anywhere else on your body. Anything we can do to prevent the head being injured, either inside the vehicle, being ejected from the vehicle or as a vulnerable road user being hit by another vehicle or, as a cyclist or motor cyclist, hitting your head, would be a help. That is the main area that there has not been much of an improvement on over the last decade.

Q79 Chairman: Mr Starling, do you have any evidence about drug taking and driving accidents, fatal or otherwise? Do you differentiate between those who take drugs recreationally and those who take drugs on a prescription, because it seems to me in this country we do not even recognise the implications of somebody who is taking prescription drugs and the effect it may have on their driving.

Mr Starling: We do not. Obviously there are some medical conditions which you need to report to your insurance company.

Q80 Chairman: Those tend to be things like epileptic fits and things which are much more major will have a direct effect before people get behind the wheel.

Mr Starling: It is important to say where we come at road safety. We basically know about injuries for which people make claims. We know surprisingly little about some of the causes of accidents in terms of speed, drugs or drink because the issue for us is when the claim comes forward and who was driving and so forth.

Q81 Chairman: Forgive me, Mr Starling. I know you are all altruists in the insurance industry but for those of you who are not there is an indication to the rest of us that possibly you do ask awkward questions. What we need to know is what does the insurance industry say about people who are taking drugs behind the wheel.

Mr Starling: We say generally do not do it, absolutely not. What I am saying is we do not have any specific data about the extent to which people ----

Q82 Chairman: You have never made the effort to drill down into what is happening in this matter?

Mr Starling: I am not sure that we would find out essentially because, if there is a claim that comes in and the claim is for an injury to a third party, it will not come in if it has been a death. Mostly it is if there has been an injury. What you then do is, first of all, you establish the liability for that injury. That may or may not involve drugs. It will rely a lot on what the police say in some circumstances. Then you assess the cost of that injury. That does relate to the earlier question. I do not know what the survival rates are like in hospital but we do know that the cost of compensating for catastrophic injury is going up all the time. It can be extremely high. We know of one case at the moment being dealt with by the Motor Insurers' Bureau where the total claimed loss is £19 million, because these are young people who require lifetime care for catastrophic injuries.

Q83 Chairman: This would be something like a quadriplegic situation?

Mr Starling: It could be paraplegic, quadriplegic, brain injury, but anything which requires lifetime care.

Q84 Mr Scott: Without making any generalisations, there are a number of cars from elsewhere in Europe on our roads now, some of which are allegedly not in terribly good condition and certainly would not necessarily pass an MOT in our country. Are there any statistics or information you have on their impact on road accidents, deaths and injuries?

Mr Starling: Yes. We did some work on this last year. We produced a report on European drivers. It is certainly the case that there has been very considerable increase in collisions involving cars from other countries, particularly eastern European countries, over the last few years. We have sent you those details so I will not repeat them, except to say that Lithuania went from one collision in 2001 to 745 in 2006, which is perhaps the most startling increase. For example, Poland has gone up by nearly ten times, 361 to 3,132. It is an issue. I think there is an issue about enforcing the laws that are supposed to be in place around registering a car when it comes across. People can drive round for a long time. The government has no record of when the cars come in.

Q85 Chairman: It is six months, is it not?

Mr Starling: It is six months. How do you know when it has been her for six months? I do not think there is any indication that that is known.

Q86 Mr Scott: You are saying that after six months it is not being enforced?

Mr Starling: That is what we understand. Some of them come from countries where - how can I put it delicately? - there may not be the same tradition of insurance as we have here, so there is an issue about claims involving these people. There is an issue about MOT or MOT equivalents. We think this is quite an important area where perhaps the EU needs to get together and sort out some of the enforcement and registration issues.

Q87 Mr Scott: We have heard a lot about novice drivers, young people driving cars, with particularly high records of accidents. You referred to not necessarily the driver being drunk but maybe passengers in the car egging them on etc. Why have we not made more headway, because certainly on this Committee we have been discussing it for quite some time. It is not new. Why has there been so little headway, in your opinion, on this?

Mr Starling: I do not know. We have come a long way in the last few months because a lot of people started talking about it. We did, you did and this Committee did an inquiry on it. I think it has caught the public imagination. One of the reasons it started to make headway is because of risk identification measurement. If you can set out figures to people on what is happening, people can grasp it better. We are enormously encouraged that the government is now tackling the whole issue of driver testing and training. We think that there are some fundamental issues that need to be grasped there. There are further issues around the number of passengers in a car and enforcement of that. I do not know why it has not attracted attention up to now. It is beginning to and more pushing is required.

Ms Ward: I conducted a study a few years ago now about young drivers driving at night. One of the things that we found from our interviewing of young drivers - there was a question earlier about risk taking - is that a very small proportion of them do take risks at night. They think it is safer to drive at night, especially on the country roads, because with headlights on you can see if something is coming. If there is not a light coming the other way, it is safe to speed, it is much more fun and there are no police on these roads anyway. There is a tiny element of risk taking and we have heard about cars with maybe a sober driver being distracted by people in the backseats feeling sick and just playing around, kicking the backs of seats and those kinds of things. All this sort of thing you are thinking is perhaps arguing for restrictions on carrying passengers at night and restrictions on young people at night and that is not something that I am particularly ----

Q88 Chairman: We are ahead of you there, so you can move on.

Ms Ward: Part of the problem is that young people in their leisure time tend to be driving in the late evening and at night. When you are looking at the risks at that time of night, they are absolutely disproportionate to the amount of traffic on the streets and to the number of young drivers driving. This is not a problem that we have in this country; it is a problem in all of the industrialised world. Everybody is trying to work out ways of improving the safety of their young drivers, but one defining feature of young drivers is that they are tending to drive smaller, older cars. You are much more at risk as an occupant of smaller, older cars if you are hit by something newer because newer cars tend to be bigger and heavier. A new Golf is much bigger, about 30% bigger, than an old Golf, for example. The new Polo is the size of the old Golf. Young people tend to drive hand me down cars. They tend to drive mum's old car. She gets the new one and the young person does not. There are all these issues as well. As David Lynam mentioned earlier, the fleet with more heavy cars in it, more four wheel drives and people carriers in it at one end, that market is increasing, so there is a lot of weight up at the top end. There is a huge increase in the number of Minis and very small cars as well. There is a much bigger disparity in the vehicle fleet. Your chance of being hit by something bigger and heavier has increased in recent years. There is nothing we can do about it. It is a lifestyle choice and in time these bigger cars will cease to exist.

Q89 Clive Efford: Is it something that we cannot do anything about? I am not so sure. Is it not the economics of it that force them into those unsafe or less safe, older cars because they are cheaper to insure?

Ms Ward: Yes.

Q90 Clive Efford: Is that not slightly counter-intuitive on the part of the insurance companies? They are insuring the vehicle rather than the person. They place more value on the vehicle.

Mr Starling: The insurance companies calculate risk from a number of factors. There is the size and the power of the car, essentially, so the smaller the car the lower the premium is going to be. It is obviously based on the age of the driver. It is not just about other vehicles on the road. An awful lot of young drivers manage to kill themselves and their occupants without any other vehicle involved. Even small cars now are perfectly capable of travelling at 80 miles an hour.

Q91 Clive Efford: Are you not arguing against yourself then?

Mr Starling: I am not sure. A lot of the issues around young drivers are around behaviour and experience and perception of risk.

Q92 Chairman: Do you share your data with the government, Mr Starling?

Mr Starling: Yes.

Q93 Chairman: Is that only through the agencies or directly through the department?

Mr Starling: We talk to the Department for Transport and also to the relevant agencies of the Department for Transport. We will share our general data with anyone. Clearly, if there is commercially sensitive stuff, that might be dealt with slightly differently but by and large the sort of data we produce is available for all. Indeed, we published some recent data which I hope the Committee has been sent.

Q94 Chairman: Have you any evidence about the Norwich Union pay as you drive insurance scheme?

Mr Starling: I do not have any evidence on how that has worked so far. Incidentally, I would add that that is an area where we do not think it is practical for government to enforce things like restrictions on driving at night. That is an area where we think the insurance industry can do its bit by making it cheaper to drive at night.

Q95 Mr Scott: Everything we have discussed and everything we have said all comes back to one thing. If enforcement is not going to be carried out adequately, whatever measures are put in place are not going to alleviate the problem and it is not going to get better. Would you agree with that? We just need more enforcement?

Mr Starling: I think it is part of the answer that we need more enforcement, but for example one of our proposals is that you should restrict the number of passengers that a young driver can carry for six months after passing their test. The vast majority of young drivers are law abiding and they would obey it. I think you can say that quite clearly. In a sense, that one change would of itself add value. Clearly beyond that you have to have some enforcement. Enforcement is important. It needs to be consistent. You need to be able to focus it in the right ways. You need to be able to develop some forms of enforcement which do not necessarily need people on the roads. For example, we are still waiting for the government to introduce continuous enforcement for uninsured drivers, enforcement from the record. If you introduce that, you no longer need to have the police on the streets enforcing it.

Q96 Chairman: What is holding that up?

Mr Starling: We do not quite know. We know that the Department for Transport wants to introduce it. We do not know whether it is an issue of budgeting or not but we think it is extremely important that that does happen. It would have the effect of enforcing but leaving the police able to do work in other areas. Enforcement is important but I think that people do, by and large, obey the law when they are driving. I think you can rely on that to some extent.

Q97 Chairman: On automation, there is going to be a complete change in vehicles in the next ten or 20 years. Many more things are going to be done routinely and indeed if you feed in all the motor manufacturing definitions of all the new tricks they are going to put into cars we could get to the point where the driver is the last one in charge of the vehicle. Is that going to have a direct effect?

Mr Starling: It could do. The history of vehicle manufacture is that safety features have come in. They tend to come in at the luxury end and go through the fleet. There are various technical measures now on controlling the car and the speed of the car etc., which have potential. They only have potential if you have to use them. If you can opt out of them, then they do not.

Q98 Chairman: Has London's emphasis on cycling and public transport with restrictions on car use and a good concessionary travel scheme produced any results, particularly those involving young people?

Ms Ward: I am afraid I cannot answer that.

Q99 Chairman: Is anyone doing any work on that?

Ms Ward: Yes. Transport for London are doing a lot of work. They are producing figures and statistical reports all the time. It is just that I do not have those figures to hand. The only surprising thing to me - and I welcome it - is that there has not been an increase in the number of collisions between motor cycles and pedestrians since the start of congestion charging.

Q100 Chairman: Is there a direct link between criminality and road safety?

Professor Allsop: The police certainly find that people they detect committing traffic offences are often offenders in other ways and I think vice versa. The first is the less obvious. There is the urban myth that you look at the able bodied people who are parking in disabled parking bays in a shopping centre and pick up quite a lot of your local criminals that way. Of course, that is a caricature but ----

Q101 Chairman: It seems a little too simple. Otherwise, I think the Met would be round every Sainsbury's in London.

Professor Allsop: When you talk to the police about allocation of effort, I think you will find they will tell you that effort devoted to traffic policing also contributes a great deal to the incidence of general crime.

Q102 Chairman: Is there a danger that if you clamp down too hard on drivers you are going to increase the number who drive untaxed or uninsured?

Professor Allsop: Yes. I think that is a danger and particularly there we need to be careful how we deal with the younger driver problem that has been discussed at some length. That is to say, we do need to bring our novice drivers through to maturity in a way that keeps them within the system.

Q103 Chairman: Keeping them alive would be quite a constructive move towards that.

Professor Allsop: First, keeping them alive but also keeping them wishing to hold a driving licence and drive legally, not feeling driven by an excessively intrusive regime.

Mr Starling: Obviously there is a risk that you might increase the number of uninsured and unregistered drivers but the important thing then is to catch them. If you catch them by number plate recognition, you can cart their cars off and crush them or you can do this continuous enforcement from the record where, if your insurance lapses, you then get a letter with an automatic fine in the same way as if you strayed into a bus lane. The key thing is you might create a bigger risk in one area but just tackle that risk. The weapons are there to tackle that risk.

Q104 Chairman: How reliable are number plates as a means of identifying a vehicle and a keeper?

Mr Starling: My understanding is that the system is pretty good. I do not have figures but it has certainly been effective. Clearly, if you are pulled up through number plate recognition and someone says that you are not insured, there is a pretty quick means of establishing that you are if you really are.

Ms Ward: I am a little bit concerned about the use of the continuous record. It is fine for those drivers that are compliant and middle class, but there is quite a rump of the population, especially the younger population, who feel rather marginalised and outside of the system. They are the ones I think that we have to work the hardest with. There is a lot of need to be starting to work much more broadly with other agencies certainly in areas where there are wider social problems because those are areas in which the wider social problems often result in what we call traffic crime. These are the youngsters driving mopeds and cars without tax and insurance. Indeed, we have been in estates where these mopeds and cars sit by the side of the road with a key in. They are effectively a pool car for anyone to use and these cars are completely outside the system. The drivers are completely outside the system and I do not think any heavy handed enforcement in these areas to catch these people is going to be welcome or productive. We have to work with the youth crime services and other agencies already working in these areas to try to tackle the root causes of some of the problems of the discontent, because some of these young people cannot work. They cannot go into further education. What they can do is drive and that gives them some defining part of their personalities.

Q105 Chairman: Part of the problem is they cannot drive.

Ms Ward: Yes, absolutely.

Chairman: One has to say enforcement is never routinely popular, irrespective of the income, the background, the age group or anything else of the driver. Everybody seems to believe they can drive. You have been very helpful to us. Thank you very much indeed. We are very grateful. It is always nice to hear that we are at least looking at things that are important. This is a matter of people's lives. Thank you very much indeed.