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

House of COMMONS

MINUTES OF EVIDENCE

TAKEN BEFORE

Transport Committee

Road Safety

Wednesday 14 May 2008

PROFESSOR PHIL GOODWIN, PROFESSOR JOHN WHITELEGG and MR FRED WEGMAN

MR ANDREW HOWARD, MR NICHOLAS BROWN, MR MALCOLM HEYMER, MR JACK SEMPLE and MR ROGER SEALEY

Evidence heard in Public Questions 196 - 308

USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT

Oral Evidence

Taken before the Transport Committee

on Wednesday 14 May 2008

Members present

Clive Efford

Mrs Louise Ellman

Mr Eric Martlew

Mr Lee Scott

David Simpson

In the absence of the Chairman, Graham Stringer was called to the Chair.

________________

Memorandum submitted by Professor John Whitelegg

Examination of Witnesses

Witnesses: Professor Phil Goodwin, Professor of Transport Policy, University of the West of England, Professor John Whitelegg, Professor of Sustainable Development, University of York, and Mr Fred Wegman, Managing Director, SWOV (Netherlands Institute for Road Safety Research), gave evidence.

Graham Stringer: Before we start, we have some housekeeping to go through - declarations of interest.

Clive Efford: Member of Unite.

Mr Martlew: Member of Unite and GMB unions.

Q196 Graham Stringer: I am a member of Unite. Welcome to the Transport Select Committee. Would you like to introduce yourselves?

Professor Goodwin: I am Phil Goodwin, Professor of Transport Policy at the University of the West of England.

Professor Whitelegg: I am John Whitelegg, Professor of Sustainable Transport at Liverpool John Moores University.

Mr Wegman: Fred Wegman. I am from the Netherlands. I am the Managing Director of the Dutch Road Safety Research Institute.

Q197 Graham Stringer: Would any of you like to make a brief statement or shall we get straight into questions?

Professor Goodwin: Straight in.

Q198 Graham Stringer: What do you think is the main role of government in relationship to road safety? It is a big question to start with.

Professor Goodwin: Starting with an easy one, yes! Let us say to provide a context in which road safety is improved. Government is not primarily going to be the main agent of accidents but it does have a very big responsibility to create the legal framework, the norms, the guidelines and, to some extent, the prevailing mood and cultural acceptance of driving behaviour that influences whether there will be a lot of accidents or a small number of them.

Professor Whitelegg: I would say that the role of government is to take a very strong line on issues which are contentious - and road safety, from my perspective, is contentious - with different stakeholders, different interest groups; to select a path, to find a way through that morass of contentiousness, to produce a situation that is significantly improved above the current situation; and, in a sense, to take the moral high ground; to take an ethical view, an operational view, a view that says, "We can do a lot better and we will do a lot better"; and then to set the framework that produces that delivery.

Q199 Graham Stringer: It is obvious what the role of the Department for Transport is, or it is fairly obvious, I think. What role is there for other government departments, apart from the Department for Transport, in reducing casualties on the roads?

Professor Whitelegg: One of the observations I would make about road safety in general is that there is probably a very severe example of lack of joined-up thinking across all government departments. The recent discussion, for example - and I know I do not have time to go into detail and so I will avoid detail - on post office closures has, in many examples I am familiar with, imposed longer, more hazardous journey times on vulnerable groups: children, the elderly, the disabled, and so on. There is no view across government on the impact of policies on road safety. There is no view within the National Health Service about the extent to which the size, location and spacing of healthcare facilities might well have a damaging or deleterious impact on road safety. There is none in the post office example. There is a very poor level of appreciation about the nature of urban design and urban space. We talk about eco-towns, sustainability and sustainable cities, but it is all at the level of rhetoric. It does not get translated into detail of how we make really safe streets and make joined-up, seamless journeys really easy and really safe. I therefore do not think that central government appreciates the way that policies interact across the widest possible range of accessibility, spatial planning, healthcare planning, and so on.

Professor Goodwin: I would perhaps add one further example along the same lines, and that is education. The location of schools and the policies which influence how far children travel to schools will affect their exposure on the roads and therefore will affect the probability of encounters with vehicles. I suppose one would say that this can be determined by a sufficiently strong lead from the Department for Transport to ensure that safety considerations, as indeed other transport considerations, are taken into account when education departments take policies from the point of view of education, health departments take policies from the point of view of health, and so on. One wants to make sure that the transport considerations, including safety, are included in those decisions.

Mr Wegman: We have come quite a long way in the last couple of decades in improving road safety in your country and in mine as well. It means that we have to look for other avenues in the future. These other avenues do not necessarily lie in the field of the Department for Transport but are far broader, not just in central government but also regional and local government. There are many opportunities there, which are not very well explored today. That is one reason why I suggest that in future we have to have a far broader perspective than we have had in the past.

Q200 Graham Stringer: I am slightly surprised that nobody has mentioned the relationship between the Department for Transport and the Home Office. Do you think that the Home Office plays as full a role in preventing casualties as it could do? Are its policies as well co‑ordinated with the Department for Transport as they could be?

Professor Goodwin: When I was in another institute some decades ago now, we did a piece of research for the Police Foundation, a research body looking at policing. The results of that research and their perceptions certainly were that traffic policing is not a high-profile career track for high fliers within the police force. It is something that clearly they all understand is necessary but there are concerns about how important it is, and especially concerns that, by too stringent policing, the police might put themselves into conflict with what they see to be the upstanding, middle groups of the community, which therefore might conflict with the public support that is necessary for other and, as they see it, more important policing objectives. It is a complicated issue but there does seem to be some truth in that: that there can be a go-softly approach to traffic policing, "Ah, well, it's the sort of thing we all do, isn't it?" - as compared with any other activity likely to cause such grievous damage to life, limb and property. Whether that is due to the Home Office or to cultures within the police force I think is a moot point, and I am not sure about that. However, I do think that there is a need to raise the profile and importance; and that actions likely to cause serious damage while you are driving are absolutely as important as potential crimes, as any other activity that people undertake.

Professor Whitelegg: Perhaps I may add to that. As part of an exercise I did in 2004-05 on a Department for Transport-funded project on the Swedish Vision Zero road safety policy, we had the much-maligned focus groups and we talked to about 230 citizens across the whole of England about road safety, targets, objectives, and what people were concerned about. There was an overwhelmingly strong view, almost without any exception, on the part of the citizens we talked to that speeding was a problem, and that was equalled by lack of police enforcement. They were very unhappy about the lack of police enforcement. Interestingly, however, they said, "But we see the point of view that we think the police are operating from. They have large numbers of demands on their time and we can see how it would be possible for a police force maybe to prioritise crime against the person, burglary, terrorism, or whatever." They were well aware of the competing demands on time, but nevertheless the strong view expressed was that there is a mismatch between what members of the public are concerned about - they want safer streets and much-reduced possibilities of being injured or killed in a road traffic accident - and the lack of police enforcement of speed limits, and the fact that the police actually operated, in their words, as a "blocking mechanism". If there was a proposal to impose a heavy goods vehicle ban on a street or have a 20 mph speed limit outside a school or a whole number of things, the police would say, "Do it if you like, but we won't enforce it because we don't have the resources". That led to a deep sense of grievance. I do not know in detail about the way the Home Office works, but in terms of the interaction between road safety issues, policing, justice, law enforcement issues, I think that there is another strong lack of joined-up thinking.

Q201 Clive Efford: In your focus groups, when people were talking about their concerns about their local communities, did they give any indication of where they ranked the issue of speeding against other issues that concerned them in their communities? Was it very high on their list of priorities?

Professor Whitelegg: In a sense, we had prejudged the situation by asking people to come and see us to talk about road safety; so they were motivated to raise issues about road safety. I think that it would therefore be unfair to try and pretend that we had a scientifically rigorous, representative sample across a range of things. In random discussion, they wanted to talk about street crime, mugging, and a whole number of other things that they thought were problematic and stopped them using the streets as much as they would like to. Speeding traffic and lack of enforcement was as high as anything that they mentioned, but it would be wrong for me to say that I have some kind of rigorous statistical sample to back that up.

Q202 Clive Efford: Did they give any indication about the use of technology, perhaps to replace police enforcement?

Professor Whitelegg: Yes. It was something that we had not raised in our briefing of the people taking part in the focus groups but that they raised spontaneously. They were very keen, for example, on whether or not speed cameras - which generally speaking they did not like - could be used as a way of controlling speed automatically, in the sense that a speed limit could be set and there would be two cameras. There is the technology around, though I am not a technology expert. Basically, there are experiments underway in London on what I think they call "averaging speed cameras", which is what they were talking about. They were very keen on technology being used, because they were very keen on not putting a high burden on police resources; so they wanted technology to substitute for police persons, because that would serve the same objective of minimising speed and controlling speed.

Professor Goodwin: There is some other survey evidence as well to add to that - the more conventional types of opinion surveys - and it is quite interesting that the idea of 20 mph speed limits, especially in residential areas or what people perceive as being residential areas, which means "where I live", has an extraordinarily high level of public support: very much higher than you would sense by looking at the statements of organised opinion of stakeholders in the transport/safety argument. It does seem to be one of the most popular potential policies that can be implemented. I think that it is also well established that potentially it is one of the biggest remaining hits that one could make on the accident rate.

Q203 Graham Stringer: How does our institutional approach to road safety compare with other European countries, both at the national level and at the regional level, as Mr Wegman suggested is important?

Mr Wegman: Perhaps I may come back to this police question. One of the best things a government can do in showing its serious interest in road safety is to bring police to the roads and streets. There are not that many other activities a government can show to the public. However, in all countries I am aware of people are complaining in the road safety sector about a lack of capacity and that they do not send a lot of police officers to the streets. They are always other priorities. We have to live with that. The only way out, in my opinion, is to add two things to police activities. First of all, public information campaigns in order to create an understanding of the police activity and an acceptance of that being done. That is the first thing they have to do. The second thing is to bring in technology. You can make simple estimates about what the police officer has to do in order to bring a specific deterrence to the road user - and that is very limited. That said, you have to do something additional to bringing officers on to the streets. In my opinion, that is future technology. Both parts are very important. Acceptance of that technology, acceptance of the police, and then to bring the message across that it is really serious when it comes to speed enforcement, or drinking and driving enforcement.

Professor Goodwin: It is an interesting question, is it not - the difference between the way in which the safety argument is conducted in different countries? The Committee, I know, has been very interested in the Swedish Vision Zero idea, and there are variants of that in other countries. I think it is the case that the biggest difference we see in those cases is in the rhetoric, for want of a better word, with which safety policies are argued at national level. I do not mean that in an insulting way. It is the way in which politicians convince themselves that this is the right thing to do. However, they only have any meaning when you get down to specific, concrete acts of policy implemented on the streets. A target, simply as a declaration, has not quite zero effect but fairly close to it. When you look at the specific acts - for example, speed humps, speed limits or enforcement levels, the 20 mph idea, the access of vehicles to specific residential areas, the conditions of law which influence who is to blame when there is a collision - all those sorts of things are specific, concrete acts and there is a large but limited repertoire, toolbox, of things one can do; and all countries choose more or less a similar pattern, though perhaps giving a slightly different emphasis. I think that is much more important than whether these policies are justified in terms of an overall vision. In terms of your own discussions, I think that I am one of the pragmatists rather than the visionaries on that.

Q204 Mr Martlew: On the priority that the various countries give to road safety - for example, if we look at the audience today it is quite sparse but when we were looking at the fiasco in Terminal 5 we were packed out and the cameras were there, although nobody was killed - do the public and the media take a more enlightened view with regard to road safety, say, in Sweden and in the Netherlands? Is it more important than it is to us?

Professor Whitelegg: I was a German civil servant for three years - which I have still not recovered from!

Q205 Mr Martlew: Neither have they, I daresay!

Professor Whitelegg: No, they have not! It was the Ministry of Transport in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, in Düsseldorf, a state of 16 million people. I have worked in Denmark and in other European countries, and there is an enormous difference between Britain and these other countries. It is simply one of boldness versus nervousness. Britain is a very, very nervous country - incredibly nervous. We have the best transport analysis and policy, in terms of documents and research, of any European country I know - and I defer to the Dutch, whose work is excellent - but we do not translate it into policy, namely to things that happen on the ground. What I mean by that is that is this. At the time I worked in Düsseldorf, we had a street party to celebrate our 10,000^th Home Zone. Ten thousand in one state of Germany. Britain now has 600 Home Zones. In 1991 we had 10,000 in one state in Germany. Graz in Austria made the whole city 20 mph in 1992. There is Freiburg in southern Germany - and the list goes on and on. The debate that we have constantly is, "Oh, dear, what shall we do? We know about speed; we know about the probability of crashes and injuries" and so on. We go round and round, and we have lots of interesting investigations and reports; then we say, "That was nice, wasn't it? But we won't do it". We are not bold. That sort of national governmental culture, wherever it comes from - I do not have an explanation of where it comes from - I think gets translated into a degree of frustration and almost disengagement on the part of the public, which goes back to your point. There is not so much interest in Britain because, again in our focus groups, the thing that came through repeatedly was, "There's no point in saying anything because nothing useful ever happens". Nothing will happen. We do not get the 20 mph; we still do not get the Home Zones; we do not get the speed enforcement. We just do not get it. The big difference between us and other countries, therefore, is simply one of boldness. The Swedish Vision Zero, as Phil said, is not unique. The Danes do not have a Vision Zero, but they have a policy that says, "One death is one death too many". Norway has a similar policy, and so it goes on. They implement it and have clear, budgeted, targeted interventions that deliver that result. We do not. We are very nervous, very complacent, and we behave more like rabbits in the headlights of an oncoming car. We go round in circles, back to where we started, and we do not do the job - that is the problem.

Mr Wegman: Until 2000 we were always looking to the United Kingdom when it came to road safety. You were the inventors of many good activities and policies. All of a sudden, somewhere in 2000, you stopped doing things and we continued with our efforts. A simple figure to illustrate that is that, compared to 2000, in 2006 you had 7% fewer fatalities in this country. We have one-third fewer. In six or seven years you managed to do something, but that was the pace of improvement that you also showed in the past. I do not have an explanation for that, but the real question is why you have not continued with your efforts. As to this item, it is right that we are doing things. Is the public waiting for it and asking for it? In a way, they are. For example, we have quite a lot of public support for the implementation of 30 kph zones - 20 mph zones. Potentially, we have 50,000 km of street lengths in which to implement it. In the last ten years, we have managed to implement 30 kph zones in 60% of those streets. Not because it was a wish on the part of the government but because the citizens asked for it. It is very important indeed that you market a solution to the public and that you are asking for those sorts of solutions. Instead of bringing the good measures to them, they ask for it. We are now running out of budget and we are looking for additional budget to continue with these efforts. Nevertheless, it is an example of the implementation of these different measures. That is not new or unknown to you. You know everything. I fully agree that you have the best experts in this country. The question is why you do not do it. I do not have an explanation for that. The problem is very similar. We are facing a new area, where we cannot simply apply the same recipes as we did in the past. We have to develop that. We need the public on our side. It is not their top priority and never has been; nevertheless, you can make progress step by step. The big question for you is "Where can we find our opportunities here?"

Q206 Clive Efford: Just to follow that up, could you elaborate for us, Mr Wegman? You said that we fail to follow through and implement changes that you have implemented. What specifically do you mean?

Mr Wegman: The first example I gave is traffic-calming, but I can give you another example.

Q207 Clive Efford: Can I just ask you what you mean by traffic-calming?

Mr Wegman: By traffic-calming we mean that we do not want to have people using residential streets as a through-traffic street, first of all, so we would like to get rid of that through-traffic in residential areas.

Q208 Clive Efford: We are talking about physical barriers, one-way systems, to stop people doing what we call "rat-running"?

Mr Wegman: Let us call it making it less attractive. The second thing is that we try to slow the traffic down to 30 kph. Again, if you accept that the only people in these areas are those who live there and have their destination there, you want to see some kind of interaction between the residents who live there, saying, "Please slow down". That is just an example. I can give you another example.

Q209 Clive Efford: Is it a request just to slow down or is it physical barriers like speed humps?

Mr Wegman: Two things are very elementary in this. First of all, that you are aware that you are entering such an area; so there is a kind of gate there to show that is a different area to the one you have been in before. The second thing is that, regularly, you have those physical means. There is always the question that people do not like it and they do not have the most positive feelings about it. Then it is a question of negotiations with the citizens: "What do you wish to see there? What kind of physical barriers would you like to have here?" Again, if people do not accept it and are against it, my recommendation will always be "Don't do it. Wait until there is a certain request and a willingness to accept such measures".

Q210 Clive Efford: How willing are people to be inconvenienced in the areas where they live? My experience of localised traffic-calming measures, where you introduce, say, one‑way systems, is that it creates a very circuitous route for people sometimes to go a short distance to get to their home in one of these new zones. Therefore, a lot of opposition is generated by any proposals, because the people do not want to be inconvenienced. How much of that did you come across?

Mr Wegman: That is well known and, again, it is a matter of the smart design of those schemes. Again, do it together with the people living there, instead of "I bring you the good message. Please buy it from me".

Professor Goodwin: I think that we have tended in the past to rely on too narrow a repertoire of instruments of traffic-calming. Essentially, it is one-way streets or cul-de-sacs and speed bumps. When you look at the textbooks now, the international textbooks on traffic-calming, there are 100 different measures, including the road surface you use, the curvature, the use of lines of sight. You have very much more effective engineering methods than the simple speed hump with a bumpy profile, with speed tables. You can use the texture of the road surface to give signals to people that this space is allowed to vehicles but is the pedestrians' property. People do actually behave in accordance with those signals. If you do all these things together and you do it with good design standards, and not too cheaply, then the experience seems to be that this is not resented by residents as something which is inconvenient; this is perceived as an improvement to the quality of their local street environment, in the same way that trees or a local park would be. It is actually a very positive thing.

Q211 Clive Efford: Could you give us an example of where a textured road surface, where pedestrians are given priority rather than cars but they come into - not contact with one another - but I am thinking of somewhere like Covent Garden. Do you have any examples?

Professor Goodwin: You want actual locations?

Q212 Clive Efford: Yes.

Professor Goodwin: We can provide you with a good list of places to look at.

Q213 Clive Efford: And the sorts of measures that are being implemented.

Professor Goodwin: Yes. To give a very simple example, speed tables, which are much broader than speed humps, with a pedestrian crossing on top of them, are a very effective, simple method of changing the perception of the driver so that they do not think, "This is a road. What are the pedestrians doing here?" They think, "Ah, this is a pedestrian space. I'd better go a bit carefully".

Q214 Clive Efford: It is remarkable that you made that last comment, because my next question was do we corral pedestrians too much?

Professor Goodwin: We do.

Q215 Clive Efford: Do we generate too much an attitude that every pedestrian that steps off the kerb into the road is a trespasser?

Professor Goodwin: I had a very interesting experience recently in an international conference, talking about pedestrian refuges. A German colleague at the conference said, "Refuge? What's 'refuge'?" We explained, "This is an island". "You mean pedestrians are refugees?" He could not get the concept of these railings which are a barrier in the way of pedestrians. We send pedestrians underneath roads, in nasty, smelly underpasses, while the vehicles get the priority of the surface. It is a crazy process of priorities.

Professor Whitelegg: This is again a matter of boldness, in that one of the issues that the discussion of Home Zones and traffic-calming raises is that a traffic engineer, or a local authority, indeed the Department for Transport, would see these as fundamentally causing problems in terms of traffic flow and congestion. There is almost a hierarchy of policy objectives, and one of the problems in Britain is that that hierarchy is often described in a benevolent way, saying, "We put pedestrians first", and then cyclists, and so on. However, every time I have looked in detail - and I have worked with dozens of local authorities - the hierarchy is the other way round. The car comes first. I even know of local authorities that are trying to remove pedestrian crossings as a way of improving traffic flow and of reducing congestion. There are the kinds of policies which would have the direct effect that I have seen in German, Austrian and Swiss cities, for example. We can close streets. If there is rat‑running on a street, close it; put bollards at both ends which are up most of the time and all the residents have a smart-card, they swipe it, and then they go down. In fact, York City Council has done this. It is the only one I know of in Britain, but there may be others. The street has been converted from an extremely unpleasant place to a place where children are playing on the streets and the whole street has taken on a new life, because a residential street had become a major traffic thoroughfare. Now it is there for everyone to see, with the rising bollards that go up and down. However, that kind of discussion which we need to have is very difficult in Britain, because of this inherent or intrinsic conflict in what we really, really want. What I think we really, really want in Britain - we could have a big discussion, but you do not have time and neither have I, about what we mean by "we" - is to have lots of cars running round, because it looks good for the economy; it is freedom of choice; it reduces congestion; and we do not really want to create highly healthy, attractive, pleasant living environments. We have to change that priority.

Q216 Clive Efford: Could I ask you to go back to the issue of lack of boldness and 20 mph zones? My experience of trying to introduce them is that there is this perverse impact now of technology. That is, because there are not speed cameras that are calibrated for 20 mph zones, police say, "If you put a 20 mph zone in, it must be self-policing". Therefore you have to spend a lot of money on speed humps and things like that, if you are to have a 20 mph zone, which seems to me to be a barrier in the way of actually introducing 20 mph zones in what we would call residential areas.

Professor Whitelegg: You have identified a crucial problem or barrier generally to making progress in terms of urban design and making places really attractive for the elderly, for children, for people with disabilities - making places nice places to live. First of all, the 20 mph calibration thing is a completely false point - that they cannot be calibrated. There is no problem technically in having a piece of equipment and technology that can identify whether a vehicle is going at 19, 20 or 21 mph. It can be done; it is being done. It is being done in York, where there are 20 mph speed limits outside schools, which are enforced. That one has therefore been resolved. The thing about self-enforcing is very much a circular kind of argument. The current position in England is that Home Zones, traffic‑calming, have to be self-enforcing, which means that there have to be humps, bumps, chicanes, build-outs, and so on, and you cannot have them otherwise. However, the international experience - and German cities have moved massively in this direction - is that you do not need the humps, bumps, chicanes and build-outs. You put up big signs. You say - in the case of Germany "Tempo-30" - "This is a 30 kph area". It is effectively policed, and every country has a different way of policing to minimise demands on police time. People get the message, and it works. The problem in England is that a Home Zone - that is, an area‑wide treatment with new surfaces, humps, bumps, chicanes and build-outs - on average costs about half a million pounds. We had one in my local authority area that covered 150 dwellings, which cost three-quarters of a million pounds. There is no chance whatsoever that we will get enough Home Zones in England, at those costs, to solve the problem. We therefore have to move in the direction of a different kind of psychology and a different kind of engineering, and that removes the barrier - but there is resistance.

Q217 Clive Efford: I know that we have been on this point for a very long time, but I have just one last quick question to follow that up. Your experience is, though, that in other countries where they have introduced Home Zones, 20 mph zones, without the build-outs and the humps and bumps, they have worked?

Professor Whitelegg: Yes, they do work. The whole city of Graz in Austria is one Home Zone and it works, and it is not all humped and bumped. It was in the early days but they have now got rid of them, and they have moved on to this kind of open-space approach - and they work.

Mr Wegman: I know the German example. In Germany they claim that it works like that. In my country it does not work like that. We need engineering measures but we also need public support, and I am not very much in favour of sending police officers to residential zones for their enforcement activities. It is simply not very cost-effective. It is far better to send your police officers to roads where you have volumes and where you have a massive neglect of the speed limits. I am not in favour, therefore, of sending police officers to residential areas. That is why I am more for self‑enforcing activities; not because it is only humps and bumps or whatever, but because people in the residential areas do accept that as a starting point and then you add, for example, those gates that I have talked about. I am also very much in favour of raised intersections. It makes it very clear that there is an intersection; it indicates that you have to slow down; there is other traffic to the intersection. That is a starting point, and sometimes you need additional, in-between, physical engineering measures.

Q218 Mr Martlew: I think it was said earlier that it is becoming more and more difficult to reduce the number of casualties. The easy bit has been done. To listen to the professor, you would think that we were one of the worst countries in the world. In fact, we are still one of the best countries in the world. Would it not be easier, if we wished to make progress fairly quickly, to have two pieces of legislation? One would be - and personally I am ambiguous about this - to reduce the alcohol limit at which people could drive; secondly, to change the novice driver system, so that people can start to learn to drive at 17 but cannot pass until 18. That would very quickly have a fairly dramatic effect, would it not, on the number of fatalities and would not cost a lot of money?

Mr Wegman: Coming to drinking and driving, in many parts of Europe - I do not exactly know the situation in your country - the public no longer accept drinking and driving. There is only 1% of all motorised transport in my country where there is drinking and driving. It means that the overwhelming majority of the population are no longer drinking and driving. However, we need to send police officers to make it clear to the public that we do not accept that. Our major problem now is that this 1% represents perhaps 20 or 25% of our fatalities. The big problem these days is how to find those who are not obeying the law.

Q219 Mr Martlew: We have a higher blood level, but we are talking about reducing it.

Mr Wegman: When we talk about making it more comprehensive, broader, my opinion is that we have to treat that as a problem of alcoholism that is manifesting itself in road traffic. Then you have a far broader perspective than just sending more police officers and bringing more police pressure on these people. The problem is that you simply do not find them. You can post a police officer on the roadside; he will wait and wait, and will see no one. Police officers do not like that. That is the reason why we have to do something different in the future than we have done in the past, in order to bring the overwhelming majority below the legal level. In your case, and the point about the legal limit, I do not believe there is a good reason to have it at that level; there is a good reason to lower it. There is one problem that you will have to face, however. Assuming that you are lowering the legal limit and at the same time you have more people above the legal limit, it means that you have to send more police officers for more people above the legal limit. That is a major problem. If you are going to change the law, you have to pay a lot of attention to the pressure by the police on those who are above the legal limit. That is not an easy problem to solve at all, assuming that there are not a lot of additional police officers to be sent onto the streets.

Professor Goodwin: Although I would add one point to that. There are cases when it can actually be easier to enforce a zero legal limit than an 80 mg legal limit. The problem with our current situation is the uncertainty. People think, "Well, I'm allowed to drink a bit", and nobody knows exactly how much that bit is or what it really means in terms of their own body physiology, or even what it means in terms of the size of the measures that are offered in homes or in pubs. The advantage of an effectively zero limit is that there is no doubt any more. People know. It is a simple decision, "I'm going to drive; therefore I won't drink". That is a question of public acceptability but, once it is gained - and I think that it is possible to gain it - you have a smaller enforcement problem with the amount of policing you need, not a larger one. I do think that it is one of the biggest examples of success, when you think that, when I was young, "one for the road" was a statement of hospitality. Now, "one for the road" is an incitement to get into trouble. It is a phrase that has simply disappeared from civilised discourse now. You do not hear people saying, "I really must have one for the road" and it was a completely normal expression of everyday life. In one generation, that is a very big effect on social norms, which I think would translate itself with a clearer decision, that drinking and driving are two things which simply do not match together, and if you are doing one you do not do the other.

Q220 Mr Martlew: The Government has just come out with a consultative document on training drivers. Have you had time to look at that? Do you have any opinions on it?

Professor Whitelegg: I have not looked at it. I intend to do so. However, going back to your original question, I think there is little doubt that we should just say yes to your suggestions. I will read what the document says and there may be an analysis.

Q221 Mr Martlew: Unfortunately, the Government have not said yes!

Professor Whitelegg: The whole thing about the Swedish Vision Zero road safety policy is that you have the kind of discussion that we are now having; you make a list of all the measures that you can possibly imagine; you do something approaching what we would call benefit cost analysis; you have a fairly integrated set of ideas about what you do first - which you do in what order - but, fundamentally, unless something fails the test of common sense, you do it all. The thing about road safety is that you just do the lot. For example, one of the 11 major policy areas of the Swedish Vision Zero road safety policy is alcohol interlock technology. Because I am from Oldham - which Mr Stringer will know quite well - I have a healthy disrespect for technology, in that I think I can find a way round it but, putting aside my origins, the alcohol interlock technology is getting a good press in Sweden. Basically, the vehicle is equipped with a sensing device and, if it senses alcohol, you cannot start the car. The Swedish Vision Zero uses technology, uses common sense, uses intelligence, and throws the lot in. All the stuff on speed, all the stuff on urban design, all the alcohol stuff, the driver training is there as well, and everything is in there. If I can be a bit rude for a moment, the point that you made at the start about Britain being the best in the world is not true.

Q222 Mr Martlew: No, I said "one of the best in the world".

Professor Whitelegg: No, it is not one of the best. What we do in Britain - and government refuses to investigate this properly - is achieve road safety improvements by terrorising people so that they do not use the road. We have the highest rate of schoolchildren being taken to school by car and the lowest rate of walking and cycling. An epidemiologist or a public health specialist will explain this better than I can, but if you remove people from the group at risk - so the population at risk goes down and down - you do not get much of the disease. If we locked up every child in a bedroom with five television sets and never let the kid out, there would be no deaths and serious injuries on the part of kids on the roads - because they would be in their room and not out on the street. We terrorise people so that they are afraid to use the streets. The safest streets in Britain are the most dangerous streets - the busy, busy streets - because nobody in their right mind lets a kid walk or cycle or cross. Elderly people stay at home, worried, upset and ill, because they cannot cross to the post office, which does not exist any more but the street is too busy anyway. We have the lowest levels of use of public space in walking and cycling of most European cities and we claim that is a road safety gain, but it is not.

Q223 Mr Martlew: Just on that point, when you and I were growing up in much less busy times of traffic, there were a lot more children killed.

Professor Whitelegg: Yes.

Mr Wegman: But at the same time you have the busiest roads of Europe. You have the highest volumes in Europe on your roads.

Q224 David Simpson: You have mentioned Germany at lot and also Holland, but in recent times France has reduced the amount of deaths on the road. Is there something we can learn from them, or what are they doing differently?

Mr Wegman: I do not know exactly, but as a matter of fact France has introduced a speed camera programme on a very large scale. Also, when in the past you got a ticket in France there was a less than 10% chance that you would have to pay it; now it is higher than 90%. They have therefore made it a serious problem, and have sent enforcement out to the French population on a massive scale. You have to compare yourself, as to whether you can improve or increase your pressure in this country compared with France. I am doubtful about that. That is why I said that if you have done that, if you have a good system of enforcement and of punishment, you cannot make a lot of progress there. My neighbour here talks about Sweden; I am talking about the Netherlands. We have a safe system approach, sustainable safety, and we have made that system the nucleus of our policy. I would invite you to make yourself somewhat more familiar with that. That is how we have to progress. We can no longer say in the future that we are just looking for the violators. Half, if not more, of our problem is related to people like you and me having a crash - just because we have a crash, because we are doing something else on the road. That is why we are in favour of something like a "forgiving road" - forgiving of your errors. It is not a real violation, in that you are going fast or over the limit; it is just because you have made an error, and you are punished in your behaviour for that error. There is nothing around you taking care of that. There I would say the safe system approach is the future for countries like ours. We have made a lot of progress already and that system approach is the next step, together with finding the real violators - people who are violating the law with higher than legal limits of alcohol and who are speeding far more than the legal limit. That is my solution in the future, and it is the same for countries like yours as it is for Sweden.

Professor Goodwin: There is another thing that is happening in France very recently, probably more swiftly than in any other country that I am aware of. It is the extent of urban policies changing the allocation of road space between private vehicles, public transport and pedestrians. For very many years, the French having been rather anti this sort of policy - with a very motor-oriented, urban life, with cars parked on pedestrian crossings, on the pavements, everywhere - when you go to the big cities in France now, it has changed enormously in the last few years. You have major urban thoroughfares that used to be six lanes of speeding traffic, which are now two lanes for cars, two lanes for buses, and two lanes doubling the width of the pavement. That is an extraordinary change in the allocation of road capacity, and of course it has effects. I do not think that it is done primarily for safety reasons; it is done primarily for sustainable transport reasons. However, it certainly has an effect on the way in which people use the road space.

Q225 Mrs Ellman: We have spoken about drinking and driving, but what about drugs, whether it be medicinal drugs or recreational drugs? How do you see that issue here and how does that relate to the rest of Europe?

Mr Wegman: It is a serious road safety problem; it is a growing road safety problem, especially when you combine illegal party drugs with drinking and driving. That increases the risk enormously. You may know that we do not yet have procedures in how to detect drugs; we do not know exactly how drugs impair driving. We are now, in European programmes, developing measures to detect drugs. The next question is whether we can make something like a legal limit, as has been done with alcohol for drinking and driving. That is a very complicated question indeed. If you say that it is illegal, then you can say that is the end of the problem - even if it does not make a problem for your driving task. Then we have to take some political steps, in my opinion, where we try to define the impairment level for drugs and driving, and then for different drugs; because it is not exactly the same for all of the different party drugs. I would say cannabis is not a big problem ---

Q226 Mrs Ellman: Would you say that there is sufficient testing of whether drugs ---

Mr Wegman: We are developing testing procedures now in a big European programme, DRUID, where we are developing types of testing devices to be used by the police on the roadside. We will have to wait another one, two or three years until we have that available, and the next step will be to introduce it in the country; because you then have to follow all the legal procedures for its acceptance in the courts.

Q227 Mrs Ellman: What about in this country? Has anyone any views on that?

Professor Whitelegg: I have to confess lack of knowledge of the drug side. I would also link any discussion of drink and drugs and other kinds of impairment, whatever they may be, back to the speed point. If you have a 30 mph limit in an urban area, enforcement rarely kicks in up to 35 mph, and any kind of impairment at those speeds will produce very serious injuries and death. Lowering speeds, therefore, has to be seen as part of a policy of dealing with a likelihood of impairment. I have no idea where we are in Britain with drugs. I wish I knew; I need to know more about that. However, I think that it is another reason why lower speeds and the enforcement of speeds are so important, because it picks up the impairment by making the consequences of decisions - which, shall we say, are not of the best kind - much less severe than they might otherwise be.

Professor Goodwin: I do not know about drugs either. We are all very innocent on these matters. However, there is an issue that we have not really started to address, namely the consequences of very large increases of people who live for very much longer, into very much older old age. There are also issues of impairment there. The other half of the question raised earlier about training drivers when they are young is what sorts of tests we maintain for a population in which 20 or 30% of drivers may potentially be wanting to drive for very much longer than it is wise to do so. I think that the issues of impairment of physical and mental alertness that are raised by drugs are also raised by medical advances in other ways, medication, and ageing itself. We have not really started to address that. I do not have a recipe for what we ought to do, but I do think that it is an agenda which is not being seriously tackled here.

Q228 Graham Stringer: Would a recipe be re-testing at 75?

Professor Goodwin: That is certainly a possibility, and it may also be that we need to address the questions of how we cope with providing mobility for elderly people who have grown up with a lifetime of motor use. Previous generations of the old had very low car ownership because they had grown up at times when very small numbers had cars. The new generation of the old have spent their whole life in a car-oriented mobility and there is little offered to them on how to live their lives, at a time when many people themselves feel less confident and less eager to take on the responsibilities of driving a ton of metal at high speeds. That is a pretty heavy responsibility.

Mr Wegman: I agree that there is a growing problem. I would solve the matter of the elderly and the ageing society as follows. We have to accept that they would like to be part of traffic on their own as long as possible. That increases their quality of life. Having said that, we have to make the driving tasks easier for them and there are several opportunities to do that, on the roads and on the technology side. The final thing we can do is to help them to understand that they have fewer skills to perform the driving task; to make them aware that there are more problems in performing the driving task, indicating where they find a solution. I will give you one simple example. Elderly people are using the roads less at night-time because they have a loss of sight. That is their own answer to the problem. They experience it themselves. Make them aware of that. I believe that it is far better to go along those lines than to find an age at which they have to do some sort of re-testing. I do not believe that we can find a valid test. Furthermore, we would have enormous problems in society in introducing a signal that you are no longer allowed to participate in traffic.

Q229 Mrs Ellman: Are the official casualty statistics reliable?

Professor Whitelegg: It is a very good question. They are reliable in the sense that, when you are talking about fatalities, they are fairly accurate; but the 30-day rule introduces a note of inaccuracy. If you die 31 days after a road traffic accident, you are not dead: you are seriously injured. With the advances of medical science and medical intervention, I think that there is a distortion. This is well known in the road safety world. Once you start getting into serious and slight injuries in the UK stats, they are very unreliable. There are well‑known reports comparing hospital data with police data and, because most of our road traffic accident stats begin their life with a police officer filling in a form at the site of a road traffic accident, decisions are made about "serious" and "slight" and that is known to introduce fairly massive distortion; so they are not reliable. Then there is massive under-reporting. Cyclists and pedestrians very often are not that inclined to report an accident or an injury. The answer is probably that they are reliable in fatalities but not otherwise, and we need to know more about under-reporting and how to deal with it. The scale of the problem is therefore bigger - that is all it means - than we currently assume.

Q230 Graham Stringer: What would explain the big reduction in serious injuries and not a similar reduction in deaths? Is that a statistical quirk or is there something completely different happening there?

Professor Whitelegg: I am sure that someone has looked at that; so, first of all, I have to be honest and say that I have not looked at the detailed stats. I know the kind of things that would explain it. There are conventions in terms of how one evaluates things at the scene of an accident. There are changes over time in how the police officers, in their training and in their experience, deal with that. There are those changes, therefore. The thing with road traffic accident stats is that we should really look at hospital data more than the road traffic accident stats themselves. Hospital data is more reliable; because when a person goes to hospital with an injury there is a formal assessment of the severity of the injury on recognised scales, with numbers attached, and that is very reliable. People, if they are injured, do tend to go to hospital if they feel the injury needs attention; so we should focus more effort on the hospital stats and not so much on the police stats. That would give us a truer picture.

Q231 Mrs Ellman: We have three categories: killed, seriously injured, and slightly injured.

Professor Whitelegg: Yes, and then damage only.

Q232 Mrs Ellman: Is that the same in other European countries?

Professor Whitelegg: To the best of my knowledge, yes. My colleague from the Netherlands will no doubt have a view but, to the best of my knowledge, in Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Austria and Switzerland, the ones you mentioned are the main categories.

Mr Wegman: What we normally use is an international severity scale; though with serious and minor injuries it is not very precise. We have injury scales in hospitals. We use them in Europe, and you do that as well. I would say that the combination of police data and hospital data is the future. We are able to match both datasets. We know that police data are not perfect, hospital data are not perfect, but the match that we can make out of those combined datasets is pretty good. My colleague says that you are satisfied with fatal accident registration. We are not. We are missing 10%, if we rely only on police data. That is why we have to combine three data sources. What we try to do, therefore, is accept that these datasets in themselves are not perfect but, by combining them smartly, we have a good picture of the reality.

Q233 Graham Stringer: We are coming to the end of our time; can I ask three or four quick questions with three or four quick answers? The motorbike statistics stand out like a sore thumb and are going the wrong way; what can we do about motorbike accidents?

Mr Wegman: I have two types of solution. First of all, motorists have to accept that it is not only a way of life-expressing, driving a motorcycle, there are others on the road as well; the second thing is that motorists should not overlook motorcycles and in that respect motorcyclists should behave themselves more defensively than they have done so far.

Professor Goodwin: Speed limitation that is seriously enforced.

Q234 Graham Stringer: Thank you. We have also identified an increasing problem with foreign drivers and not being able to follow them up after accidents or breaches in the law. Is that a problem in other European countries?

Mr Wegman: Yes, it is.

Q235 Graham Stringer: What are they doing about it?

Mr Wegman: It is not very well solved. They are allowed to travel, they do travel, they live far more in other countries than in the past and it is a new type of problem we have to face. We do not have the answer already.

Professor Whitelegg: We have to remember that British drivers go into other countries - I am sure that was part of your question.

Q236 Graham Stringer: It was.

Professor Whitelegg: I am perhaps too much influenced by reading scurrilous newspapers but normally it is put the other way round. British drivers do spend a lot of time on Spanish roads and get into great difficulty, and I think there is a discussion within the European Commission along the lines of European driving licences and European satellite tracking systems and registration systems, so eventually there will be the kind of big brother technology, I guess; whether that is acceptable to some of us I am not so sure, but it will deal with the problem you raised.

Q237 Graham Stringer: Can we make driving safer or do all measures ultimately depend on changing road user attitudes?

Professor Goodwin: I do not think road user attitude is a decisive thing that will be important for the political acceptability of measures, but actions have the effects that they do, whether people like it or not. I would, however, say that road user behaviour - distinguishing between behaviour and attitude - is absolutely vital, and the experience we have is that behaviour is complicated, people are very much more adaptive than we give them credit for, not all the adaptations are in the direction that we would like them to be, though many of them are, and any initiative for road safety needs to be monitored and addressed very, very closely. You have to work it out and you have to be confident that it is having the effect that you really want it to have.

Q238 Graham Stringer: Does the fact that about a third of drivers are fined for speeding or for parking offences every year make it more difficult to change behaviour, does it alienate drivers?

Professor Whitelegg: I do not think it does and I think there are people more expert than I am about massive changes in behaviour across society. When I used to get the No 12 bus from Durkett to Middleton when I went to school every day I used to sit on the top deck of a double deck bus in a cloud of smoke; everybody on the top deck of the No 12 bus was smoking. When I describe that now people think I am making it up or that maybe I am coming from the 1920s or something; we have seen massive changes in behaviour where masses of the population have done a particular kind of thing and then the pendulum has swung and they have gone to the other extreme. I do not see any problem at all with a programme of really intensive discussion, awareness-raising, legislation, enforcement and public health prioritisation changing these attitudes. Driving and road safety is still regarded as not really a serious problem, not really a criminal offence, not really an issue that people should be worried about and should be uptight about; I think we should all be really, really worried and really, really uptight and sort it out. Government has to take a lead, to go back to your opening question.

Q239 Graham Stringer: Finally, what are the most important targets to be set for the future to improve road safety?

Mr Wegman: I am very much in favour of targets first of all, I am positive about the vision as well, so that is the next step for you, perhaps, but added to that is a targeted programme that is realistic, where you know how to reach the target, and I am very much in favour of an ambitious target. Do not make it too easy.

Q240 Graham Stringer: In particular areas, which areas would you prioritise?

Mr Wegman: I would suggest that it is dependent on the areas where you can make progress; what I call a targeted programme. I would like to improve the situation of novice drivers and I am convinced, I have no doubt, that there would be a reduction like this. Based on that I make a target, so not specific for that group for the whole and then you have a targeted system that is for everybody to implement; that is crucial in my opinion.

Professor Whitelegg: I am a great believer in the canary in the cage model of life; once the yellow thing drops off its perch you know there is something wrong. We should have zero deaths and zero serious injuries for all child pedestrians and all cyclists.

Q241 Graham Stringer: Those are your targets.

Professor Whitelegg: Yes.

Professor Goodwin: I suppose the thing to add is that we want to reduce all accidents - fatal, serious and slight - and if there are some which are coming down very successfully and some which are not then we ought to be focusing more attention on the ones that are not, and that will change from year to year. If there are, as there are, aspects of safety statistics which are not showing the successes of the overall figures then they ought to be the ones we focus on.

Graham Stringer: On that note can I thank you all for coming and being such interesting witnesses. Thank you all. Can we have the next set of witnesses, please?

Memoranda submitted by Association of British Drivers, the Motorcycle Action Group, Road Haulage Association and Unite - the Union

Examination of Witnesses

Witnesses: Mr Andrew Howard, Head of Road Safety, Automobile Association, Mr Nicholas Brown, General Secretary, Motorcycle Action Group, Mr Malcolm Heymer, Traffic Management Adviser, Association of British Drivers, Mr Jack Semple, Director of Policy, Road Haulage Association, and Mr Roger Sealey, Researcher - Transport, Unite - the Union (Transport & General), gave evidence.

Q242 Graham Stringer: Can I ask the witnesses to introduce themselves?

Mr Howard: I am Andrew Howard, Head of Road Safety at the AA, Automobile Association.

Mr Brown: My name is Nick Brown, I am the incoming General Secretary of the Motorcycle Action Group.

Mr Heymer: I am Malcolm Heymer, I am a Transport Planning and Traffic Management Adviser to the Association of British drivers.

Mr Semple: Jack Semple, Director of Policy, Road Haulage Association.

Mr Sealey: Roger Sealey, I am the Transport Researcher of the T&G section of Unite - the Union.

Q243 Graham Stringer: Welcome again. The first question is what is the major role of Government in relation to road safety?

Mr Howard: Ultimately it must manage and it must guide and it must try and make sure that what it is doing will get it elected next time, because governments like to do that.

Mr Sealey: The role of Government is to identify what the risks are and then in that sense set them in order and attempt to deal with the most obvious ones first.

Mr Heymer: Government needs to obviously set a framework within which road safety is taken forward but it needs to recognise that you cannot use legislation and enforcement as the only way of achieving road safety, you have to give responsibility to road users. The trend in recent years has been the opposite, through additional legislation and additional enforcement it has been taking responsibility away from road users which means that they then feel that they are absolved, to a certain extent, of responsibility. I think we need to reverse that trend.

Mr Howard: I would not agree that they feel absolved but I would agree that they feel concerned that they are being overly restricted, overly looked at, and at times this leads them to question actually why the law was being passed, even if it was passed for the best reasons. We have all seen and we have all read of the various suggestions that various measures are much more about money than they are about promoting road safety, and maybe a lot of drivers believe that and a lot of drivers therefore believe that the measures that they have been given are not actually measures about road safety at all, they are for other motives and therefore why obey them.

Q244 Mr Martlew: You do not believe that.

Mr Howard: I think I have to say that I do not believe that, no, but certainly in day to day contact with the people I do it is a question I am commonly asked.

Mr Brown: I would say that Government's role, having passed legislation in a Road Traffic Act which speaks of providing a safe and efficient highway network for all classes of road user, should be to make sure that local authorities actually think about motorcyclists in doing that because for 20 years or so, up until the mid-1990s, there was absolutely no consideration of the needs of motorcyclists. That is reflected in the accident statistics and the changes that we have seen in recent years with the Government's motorcycling strategy and with more local authorities beginning to think seriously about motorcycling, we are way behind the game on that and there is an awful lot of safety advantage to come yet.

Mr Semple: I would agree with all that has been said about the framework; I would just add that perhaps we need to understand more about the causes of accidents, I am not sure that the motoring public - whether it is motorcyclists, motorists or lorry drivers - have as much understanding or Government has as much understanding as to what causes accidents as they might have.

Mr Howard: I certainly think that is an area where drivers do struggle. They see a lot of safety schemes and safety things happen, but because they do not really have an in-depth understanding of the accident problems it does not dawn on them what could be a problem and nowhere better does it get shown than the fact that if you go out and ask drivers where is dangerous, you will probably discover that the motorway ends up sitting at the top of the list and a lot of them, for example, who get bitterly angry about speed cameras get angry about the fact that they are on perfectly safe rural roads. Those of us who look at the statistics know that the rural roads are not perfectly safe.

Q245 Mrs Ellman: Mr Sealey, in your written evidence you have written about loading vehicles as an area of concern, how great a concern is that?

Mr Sealey: It is a concerns and it is an increasing concern; it is not only recognised by us but I have had a discussion with the skills for logistics training body and they recognise the problem as well. It is two things; one is a change where in the past the lorry driver would always supervise the loading of the lorry but these days quite often they are not there when the lorry is being loaded so they have no idea what is on there and how the weight is distributed. That is a real problem, so when they drive out onto the road the load could be unbalanced and that causes the lorry to overturn.

Q246 Mrs Ellman: Who do you feel should be addressing that?

Mr Sealey: It is a question of responsibility and ultimately the responsibility legally is with the lorry driver for ensuring that the load is safe, but the lorry driver in a lot of cases does not have access to the load so he cannot see, so there is a conflict between the law and what employers and their customers actually allow their driver to do.

Mr Semple: A lot of this comes back to the health and safety officers on loading sites who increasingly, in the aggregates sector for example, will not let the driver anywhere near the loading of his lorry and, in developing the health and safety structures for sites, take insufficient account of the requirements of the vehicle when it goes on the road. This is something that we are talking about at the Road Haulage Association. It is similar in a number of distribution centres but another problem area is perhaps coming out of the docks and ISO containers where it is very difficult for the driver to know exactly what is on the vehicle. Having said that, I think we have a better loading culture in this country than in much of continental Europe and Ireland.

Mr Sealey: There may be disagreements between us and the RHA in that view because certainly we think that a lot of the pressures are actually time pressures in regard to the just-in-time systems and, as we said in our evidence, a lot of the times when the load becomes unbalanced is actually halfway through the trip when the driver is hitting a distribution centre and some of the load is taken off. The people who are taking the load off have no idea about the delivery trade, have no idea of how the weight should be distributed on the lorry to make that load safe. They just put it back any way and that is where the instability is coming from.

Mr Semple: I would agree with my colleague. The driver remains legally responsible and always will do, so if something goes wrong on the road the driver is responsible and certainly in the professional haulage sector the employers are very aware of that and are very keen for customers and loading points to take account of a multi-drop operation and load the vehicle properly. The driver had greater input to that in the past than he has now.

Q247 Mrs Ellman: Mr Brown, you say in your evidence that future road safety policy should be made more specific. What would you like to see in relation to motorcycling?

Mr Brown: With motorcycling, having spent the past nearly 20 years working with local authorities and industry trying to find innovative ways of improving motorcyclists' lot one of the things that the on-the-ground evidence shows is that if the general public is more aware of motorcyclists then motorcyclist casualties come down and their collisions with other people come down. If you look across Europe, as I have been doing with colleagues from the European industry, those countries that have higher instances of motorcycle use have lower rates of motorcycle collisions because the public is more aware of them. One of the first effects when the congestion charge was introduced in London was that motorcycle traffic went up tremendously and their collisions with other people came down, and a lot of the research that has been commissioned by DfT and other people has shown over the years that a lot of the problems that we have with motorcycle safety is about other people not thinking about motorcycles being present, not looking out for them, not considering the differences between a motorcycle on the road and other vehicles.

Q248 Mrs Ellman: Is the emphasis on reducing speed the right one?

Mr Sealey: In our view, no; I think the biggest problem that we have to deal with is fatigue, that is the biggest problem in terms of road safety at the moment and that has to be reduced.

Mr Heymer: We obviously feel that speed limits have been reduced too much already in recent years and the over-emphasis on speed is not justified by the casualty statistics. The Department produced figures in 2006 showing that in only 5% of accidents was exceeding the speed limit a causal factor, not necessarily the only one and in about 12% of fatalities, so it is a much smaller proportion than, say, the factors of inattention or not looking properly which are more educational issues. We feel that there should be far more emphasis on the education of road users and it should not be just a matter of do this and do not do that, it should be educating people to manage risk. Basically, driving is a process of continuous risk management and people need to be equipped to do that.

Q249 Mrs Ellman: Does that mean that you accept the current level of casualties?

Mr Heymer: No, not at all, we believe that casualties have not been going down as much in recent years as they had been previously, at least measured in terms of deaths, which as we have already heard is the only really reliable figure. They should have gone down more and we believe that the emphasis on speed has actually had a negative effect on forcing down casualties because over the last 10 to 15 years there have continued to be major improvements in car design, both active and passive safety, which should have been reflected in improvements in casualties by now, but that has obviously been negated by other factors, one of which we believe is the emphasis on speed to virtually the exclusion of everything else.

Q250 Mrs Ellman: How can bringing down speed increase casualties?

Mr Heymer: It is not bringing down speed, it is giving people the impression that obeying the speed limit is the be all and end all so that as long as they see the sign at the side of the road and match the needle on the speedometer to the figure there, then that is it, that is the end of their involvement, and of course that is not correct at all.

Q251 Mr Martlew: I am fascinated by your argument there. Are you saying that if people drove faster there would be less fatal accidents?

Mr Heymer: No.

Q252 Mr Martlew: That seems to be what you are saying; can you clarify it, please?

Mr Heymer: Inappropriate speed is certainly an issue but that is not necessarily the same as exceeding the speed limit. People need to adjust their speed according to the conditions and in order to do that they need to realise that they have responsibility for adjusting their speed. If they are told time and time again that speed limits are the be all and end all they will adjust their speed to the speed limit and at times they will be going too fast, even tough they are within the speed limit.

Q253 Mr Martlew: So you are not advocating increasing speed limits, are you?

Mr Heymer: Certainly we are advocating a return to the 85^th percentile rule which was in force up to 2006 which means that the speed limits are set as close as possible to the speed that 85% of drivers would not exceed anyway. This is a process which has been found in other countries, especially the United States, to be the most effective in getting maximum compliance and minimum casualties.

Q254 Mrs Ellman: What does that mean then?

Mr Heymer: It means that if you set the speed limits according to the 85^th percentile you would get a good level of compliance, very few people would exceed it, because the majority will obey it anyway which means that it gives a strong message to the remainder that they should obey it; therefore you get less spread of speed and it is spread of speed rather than speed per se which has been shown time and time again to be a major contributor to accidents.

Mr Semple: As a motorist it seems that the worst offences are the ones where the speed is exceeded by a great deal. I would just like to say that in the haulage sector our members are very, very keen for an increase in speeds on the A road system from 40 miles an hour, which is the current lorry driver speed and which the great majority of our industry feel is too low, and I think in terms of road safety there is a real case to be looked at for at least trialling a higher speed limit on A roads. There is a great deal of frustration that builds up on the part of motorists following lorries at 40 miles an hour on particularly the trunk roads.

Mr Sealey: Just on that point, the 40 miles an hour, we represent quite a large number of lorry drivers and it is never an issue that has actually been raised with us in terms that 40 miles an hour is a problem, so I do not recognise that argument.

Mr Semple: It is a problem that is raised in a great many meetings with RHA members and I would think the overwhelming majority of RHA members would raise that as an issue.

Q255 Mrs Ellman: What should the priorities for road safety be over the next ten years or so; are there any particular routes that you think should have more attention or are there any particular areas of concern that you think should be addressed?

Mr Howard: There are three that really leap out. We have obviously got the drink and drug impaired drivers and we have obviously got to pay a lot of attention to them, and we have got the young driver problem. Although it does not leap out on any statistical basis I suspect that if you roll on 10 or 15 years we will start to see an older driver problem unless we start to provide for it adequately over the coming years. Certainly within the next target period we have got to think about how we are going to handle older drivers and I would actually think they are beginning to need a target of their own. Oddly, I may even advocate that that target was lower than any overall target that was set because we are going to have more and more of them in that time, but at the same stage we need a target there and we need to think about how we are going to equip them properly for the world that they are moving into, and whether that is how we encourage them to regulate themselves, which would be ,my favourite, or whether it is going for some other effort I do not know, but we do need to help them regulate themselves into the newer, busier world they are in.

Q256 Graham Stringer: Do you believe that the age for being able to hold a full licence should be raised to 18 and do you think that older drivers should be tested at, say, 75 or it might be 80, or it might be 70? Do you think that would help road safety figures, would you support those measures?

Mr Howard: I do not think any kind of retesting for older drivers would be a particularly good idea. The first reason I say that is that a lot of them restrict themselves, a lot of them say I do not want to drive on motorways, I do not want to drive in the dark, I do not want to drive in the rain and they keep away from that. If we retest them and they pass the probability is that they will drive in those places that they do not want to and the self-regulation that we have generated down the years will go away. I would also worry that in the same way as satellite television channels show you life insurance advertisements all the time are always stressing the fact that you do not need to do a medical if you are eligible to get one of their policies, because they are scared they will scare you off, there would be a risk that quite a lot of older people would decide I have to do my 75 or 80, whenever it is, retest, I will pack up now and we would end up with a major problem with how we move those older people around and how we make sure they have a proper life. At the younger end of the scale the question I would say was more difficult, and a lot of it is tied up with the fact that people now expect to be able to take their test at 17, people now tend to go to university at 18 and it is how we work round all those changes. The year's delay I have always felt could end up as being a very bureaucratic and very complicated arrangement to enforce properly.

Mr Brown: I think we need imaginative new types of target but I think we should spend far more time looking at rates and looking at reasons in a way that we have not been able to with the 2000 targets and the 2010 targets. If we look at a rate-based target then the changes in exposure to risk - so more or fewer motorcyclists, more or fewer pedestrians - get accounted for in the progress towards the target. Also, now that we have more than two years of police data talking about the causal factors of an accident we could actually target some of the bigger causal factors. In motorcycle accidents three-quarters of them involve another road user and the biggest single causal factor is the other road user's failure to look properly. That has been shown time and time again, not just in the police statistics but also in in-depth studies, and we are now in a position where we can start thinking about targets that get underneath why the numbers are the way they are.

Q257 Mr Martlew: Just on that point, you say that the majority of cases are basically people in cars or vehicles not seeing the motorcyclist; do you think that the courts are dealing severely with this issue? I hear of cases of people who are involved in a fatal accident with a motorcycle and the punishments are very light; is that your opinion?

Mr Brown: It is certainly something that worries our members a great deal and it does tie in to a general feeling that motorcyclists are valued less than other people. Whether that is a fair analysis or not, I think the law is a very complicated thing and the rules of evidence and the ability to get over people's stereotypes in giving their witness statements makes it difficult, if you like, for a rider to get a good deal sometimes. A lot of those stereotypes about motorcycling of course and motorcycle accidents just do not get borne out by successive years of accident data and analysis.

Q258 Clive Efford: Do you think we place too high a priority on the rights of way of drivers and not enough on the rights of pedestrians?

Mr Sealey: It depends on which drivers you are talking about. A lot of the discussion we have had at the moment has been about mainly private drivers; professional drivers work in a totally different environment so you have to separate that argument out and look at the environment for professional drivers where they are regulated much more, their hours are regulated and what are the reasons for that? We know the reason for that is that they are much more liable to be involved in a sense in more serious accidents than a lot of civilian drivers.

Mr Semple: Can I pick up one or two points on that? I absolutely agree in terms of professional hauliers being highly regulated and highly trained as well and the lorry sector has a very good road safety record, both at the European level and also in terms of motorists, so a truck is 40% cent in round numbers less likely to be involved in an accident than a car. We are not sure of the causes of those accidents but I would say that truckers to a degree, in terms of their core road safety culture - and I think Unite's members are part of this as well - could be role models for motorists because they have a more defensive driving culture. The one area where we have concern is that while the UK truck fleet is less likely to be involved in an accident than a car, despite the size and weight of the vehicle - and obviously if there is an accident it is more serious - the same cannot be said of the foreign vehicles visiting these shores, the international vehicles, which are much more likely to be involved than a car and very much more likely than a UK vehicle. There is a real problem for the foreign driver in terms of a blank spot on his front nearside view which we think the Department for Transport ought to raise awareness of and could do more. Also, we have a concern at the continuing lack of any practical sanction for anything other than the most serious infringements of the road haulage rules and we are some way off yet. At the moment, incredibly, there is nothing - I think we disused this before in the Committee - there are no sanctions that can be taken against foreign lorry drivers.

Q259 Clive Efford: The question was do we place too high a priority on the rights of way of drivers and not enough on the rights of pedestrians. Mr Heymer.

Mr Heymer: Obviously, all road users are entitled to use the roads to get to where they want to go and there has to be a balance between the different road users and obviously that balance changes depending where on the road network one is. Clearly, on motorways you would expect the right of way to go to motor vehicles and in town centres you would expect it largely to go to pedestrians and, to a certain extent, cyclists.

Q260 Clive Efford: You are a very vocal group defending the rights of drivers; do you feel hard done by, do you think drivers are too restricted, do you think that there are too many rules restricting the freedom of drivers?

Mr Heymer: There are in places, yes.

Q261 Clive Efford: Can you give us some examples?

Mr Heymer: In some city centres, for example, we have the allocation of road space to buses which has actually taken capacity out of the road network and has led to extra congestion; then of course local authorities come along and say congestion is going up so we need to introduce congestion charging and that sort of thing. The timing of some traffic lights has been altered ---

Q262 Clive Efford: Bus lanes cause congestion.

Mr Semple: May I come back at one point very directly, if I could, and I apologise for straying from the point. One area where I think a lot of road users have difficulty, certainly trucks, is that a lot of cycle lanes are inappropriate. In the previous session the target was suggested as zero injuries to cyclists; that is not going to happen while we share the road space with other vehicles and certainly there is the proliferation of cycle lanes, many of which are judged quite broadly to be inappropriate.

Mr Heymer: I would agree with that and in fact many cyclists do not like some of the on-road cycle lanes that are provided because they feel that they should be riding with the traffic and part of the main traffic, and if a cycle lane exists they are expected to stick to the kerb and drivers resent it if they come out of the cycle lane, so a lot of these cycle lanes are pretty useless and really should go.

Mr Semple: We could take them more seriously and invest more in putting the cyclists in a really safe area and then more people would take the exercise and cycle.

Q263 Clive Efford: I do not know if you heard the previous witnesses but certainly two of them were advocating that the attitude that we instil in drivers is wrong, that there is an emphasis on the right of way for cars and that somehow pedestrians are treated as an inconvenience that slow down the passage of cars. Do you think there is something that we could do to educate drivers more about speeding and about being aware of the dangers of other road users, including pedestrians?

Mr Howard: There is a lot that we need to do to educate drivers in all sorts of areas.

The Committee suspended from 4.17 pm to 4.29 pm for a division in the House.

Q264 Clive Efford: What more can be done to educate drivers about the dangers of speeding and the threat to other road users?

Mr Howard: I had launched into a reply; unfortunately, I have been practising for the entire interval how I was going to answer the divided space for pedestrians question.

Q265 Clive Efford: Have a go at both.

Mr Howard: I was going to say on that that it is very much horses for courses in terms of where you can separate pedestrians and where you should not. Old animal behaviours tend to show that they feel at home and they move quicker when everything is delineated, so created confusion is a good thing, but it is doing it in the right place, and I want to make the point that people like the Guide Dogs for the Blind Association and other organisations are quite worried about shared space, and that might be something the Committee would like to look at in the course of this inquiry if they look down that line. Staying with educating drivers, there is so much that needs to be done, not just in educating them in the whole idea of going slow but trying to educate them in the idea of why we want them to go slow. We have seen in some cases people put up signs that say "69 casualties in the last year" or something like that; that starts to explain it. In other places they put up signs that say "deceiving bends" or "dips in the road" or something like that but one of the things I think drivers would react an awful lot better to on a road where the speed limit does not look right, would be some kind of explanation to them of why it is so slow.

Mr Semple: There is a great need for a cultural shift in terms of understanding and an appreciation and awareness of other people on the road and beside the road.

Q266 Clive Efford: I will leave that there and move on. What measures have been most effective at reducing casualties since 2000?

Mr Heymer: The problem is that we have not really reduced casualties that much since 2000 based on the deaths figure which, as we have already heard, is the only reliable one. Some research I saw some years ago suggested that if we looked at the reasons why road deaths have come down in most countries since the 1960s, something like 40% was due to better vehicles, another 40% was due to better roads and the remaining 20% was due to everything else which included legislation and enforcement. As I said earlier, we have continued to get better vehicles over the last 10 to 15 years but we have not had so much in the way of better roads, the roads programme has stalled recently since the mid 1990s which has led to increasing levels of traffic on overloaded single carriageway trunk roads which are roads with a high accident rate and a lot of those roads need replacing with dual carriageways or motorways. Part of the problem I think we have had is the lack of investment in the infrastructure but also, as I said before, it is the culture in terms of speed limit enforcement which has really reduced drivers' feelings of responsibility towards other road users, they just feel that as long as they obey the simple rules then that is all they need to do, which is of course not the case.

Q267 Clive Efford: That is a myth, is it not? Where is the evidence that proves that that is the case, that just because there is a speed camera in an accident blackspot therefore drivers feel that they have got no responsibility for controlling their vehicle's speed. What suggests that that is true?

Mr Brown: It is not the camera itself, it is the whole culture that the cameras and enforcement produces, the culture that says exceeding the speed limit is the primary cause of accidents, when of course we know it is not, but that is the message that has been given.

Q268 Clive Efford: Do we know that? You are making these statements but can you back them up? "Research by the Transport Research Laboratory has found that crash risk rises the faster a driver travels, with a driver travelling at 25% above the average speed being six times more likely to be involved in a crash." That is scientific evidence; what evidence have you got that says that is wrong?

Mr Heymer: There is certainly evidence that the 85^th percentile speed is the optimum speed at which to set speed limits, that is evidence that goes back to the 1940s in the United States and elsewhere, so if you reduce speed limits below that you will get a greater spread of speed, and as you quote there people who drive a lot faster than the average are at higher risk and also those who drive a lot slower than the average. The idea is to get the spread of speed down and you do that best by setting speed limits a\t the 85^th percentile, which is what we have now gone away from.

Q269 Clive Efford: Remind me, the 85^th percentile would set a speed limit of what?

Mr Heymer: It depends on the road, you measure the speed and then you set the speed limit at the level that 85% would drive within in any case and only 15% would exceed it.

Q270 Clive Efford: One of the things that we have heard is about clarity in terms of speed limits so that people understand what is expected of them on certain roads, so we have a limited number of speed limits. You are suggesting that people would turn a corner and go into a road where the 85^th percentile would result in a 5 mph reduction in speed limit; is that what you are suggesting?

Mr Heymer: People would adjust their speed according to the visual clues given to them by the road environment, that is what determines how fast or how slow they go.

Q271 Clive Efford: How do we know if they are speeding then?

Mr Heymer: The definition of speeding is exceeding the statutory speed limit, but if a speed limit is set at a level below which drivers expect to see a speed limit then more of them are going to break the speed limit so you have more speeding.

Q272 Clive Efford: Perhaps I am being incredibly dim. If you are saying - I think I have heard you right - that the road environment would set the speed limit because drivers would drive at a certain speed and you take the 85% as the average and you would set the speed for that particular road at that level, have I got that right?

Mr Heymer: Yes, you would set it as close as possible.

Q273 Clive Efford: So the road around the corner could be a completely different speed is my point.

Mr Heymer: Yes.

Q274 Clive Efford: So on a short journey you could encounter several different speed limits.

Mr Heymer: Indeed. Obviously you cannot have speed limit changes too often which is why it is important not to over-use local speed limits.

Q275 Clive Efford: You do not think that speed limits are too fast then at the moment.

Mr Heymer: No.

Q276 Graham Stringer: What speed limit would you have on the M40?

Mr Heymer: On the rural section we would recommend an 80 mile an hour speed limit, on most rural motorways.

Q277 Clive Efford: You have quoted America, America does not have speed limits that high even in the most rural areas.

Mr Heymer: They abolished their 55 mile an hour speed limit back in 1995 and many states have set speed limits up to about 75 miles per hour. It varies.

Q278 Mr Martlew: It is a fact of course that the faster a car is going when it hits a pedestrian the more likely it is to kill the pedestrian.

Mr Heymer: Yes.

Q279 Mr Martlew: If we talk in particular about children who are uncertain in how they will behave, how does your driver when there is no speed limit compensate for that, for the child who runs out from behind the car and he hits them at 40 miles an hour instead of 20?

Mr Heymer: For a start I am not suggesting there should not be any speed limits, but the speed limits have to reinforce the driver's appreciation of the road environment. If we want to change that then you need to change the road environment to agree with the speed limit. Coming back to the impact speed, obviously the laws of physics say that the faster you hit something the more damage it is going to cause, but when you actually look at the statistics only about 2% of pedestrians who are hit or involved in collisions are killed, which according to the graph of impact speed versus fatality proportion means that the average impact speeds must be well below 20 miles an hour. You do not want people hitting pedestrians at 20 miles per hour or any other speed, you want them not to hit pedestrians at all.

Q280 Clive Efford: Do you agree with the introduction of 20 mile per hour zones in residential areas?

Mr Heymer: In appropriate areas but not as a blanket 20 miles per hour over all urban areas because obviously that would include roads which are not suitable for 20 miles per hour, but in cul-de-sacs and small housing developments then fine.

Q281 Clive Efford: Small housing developments. Do you think that there has been a reduction in roads policing?

Mr Heymer: Certainly there has, but whether it has reduced as much as people perceive it to have reduced is debatable. I think a lot of the problem is that people perceive roads policing has gone down which is why the irresponsible minority feel they can get away with things like drink and drug driving and so on.

Q282 Clive Efford: Do you accept that on the whole the public want to reduce speeds for environmental reasons as well as for road safety?

Mr Heymer: I am rather doubtful that the majority of them want to reduce speed limits for environmental reasons but people are very ambivalent about speed limits, they might like other people to slow down but those same people when they drive their cars do not do so, so there needs to be a balance.

Mr Howard: Coming at it from a slightly different angle, because AA members are by definition drivers, we also accept the fact that they walk, cycle and do all other things. We are well aware that they would like to see speed limits reduced and we know from the 17,500 people we now regularly survey on motoring matters that well over 50% of them would like to see more 20 mile an hour areas in urban areas. Again, one of the things that we are trying to turn our minds to would be ways that we can pump-prime that system in the hope that it will get public acceptance going of the 20 mile an hour limit rather than some kind of fear that it is yet another restriction being placed upon them.

Q283 Clive Efford: Do you think speed cameras are used appropriately?

Mr Howard: We generally do. Again, we poll and we get a constant between 69 and 75% of people who say it is acceptable, but again that is when we ask them a question which does not say "As a driver passing one do you think they are acceptable?" we ask them whether they think so as a resident and as a person who walks and cycles too.

Q284 Clive Efford: Does anyone else want to come in on speed cameras?

Mr Sealey: Again we have a difference between ordinary drivers and professional drivers. Professional drivers cannot use the argument of speeding in a sense as a defence, they are expected to know the speed they are travelling at and they cannot use that as an argument, so speed cameras for them in a sense are irrelevant. Again, we are dealing with different types of drivers.

Q285 Clive Efford: Do you have any comment about speed cameras - I am sure you do?

Mr Brown: The ABD's position is that we do not generally approve of them, we think there are better ways of slowing people down where they really need to be slowed down - things like the vehicle activated signs which are very much cheaper than speed cameras to install and maintain and which really grab the driver's attention, so if you are approaching a crossroads or a bend above the pre-set speed it will flash at you and warn you of what is coming up, and that is going to grab your attention much more than a speed camera, especially one that perhaps is not in full view and will only penalise you after the event and will not slow you down and stop you going off the road in the first place.

Q286 Clive Efford: You do not think that being hit in the wallet is a deterrent for drivers.

Mr Heymer: If they do not know about it at the time then it is not going to change their behaviour in the following 14 days it takes for it to come through. If the idea is to slow them down rather than penalise them then vehicle activated signs are an ideal way of doing it.

Q287 Clive Efford: You do not accept that the introduction of speed cameras in accident blackspots has actually reduced speeds and reduced accidents.

Mr Heymer: When you look at the overall casualty figures as I said before and look at the road deaths since speed cameras came in, the rate of reduction has slowed dramatically. Certainly, a lot of speed cameras were introduced in places where ---

Q288 Clive Efford: But that is a self-fulfilling prophecy, is it not? What you have to do is go back to those particular spots and look at the accident rate before the cameras were put in and look at it now; that is the fair comparison, is it not?

Mr Heymer: It is, except for the fact that in many cases the before figure was abnormally high and often an upward blip in accidents at a site where a speed camera is subsequently installed is likely to reduce anyway by virtue of the law of averages, it is called regression to the mean. That accounts for a lot of these so-called claims for reductions at speed camera sites.

Q289 Mr Martlew: Can I just come on to young drivers which have been identified as an area where there is a particular risk. In your opinion, why have we not made progress with this particular group, what is the problem?

Mr Howard: I am always tempted to go back to the fact that what we need to do is tackle attitude. All the time we have looked at ways of tackling skill so far but it is attitude that makes these young drivers choose to drive badly. The research always suggests that it is not that they do not know how to drive properly, it is that they choose not to drive properly. That is an attitude thing and the key has really lain for years and years now in getting it into the school curriculum somehow, and what I hope is that the various attempts which will come up following the consultation which was published last week may serve to get it into schools and I hope that they can look at things like whether the theoretical test can be used as an additional lever to get it into schools because perhaps even pupils will stay after school if they can do something which will get them through the theoretical test at the end of their course.

Mr Brown: We also have a difficulty with the cost of accessing rider and driver training. With riders, if I can just focus on that in particular, as of October of this year the number of centres run by the Driving Standards Agency where you can take your motorcycle test will drop from 220 to less than 50, so people will be having to travel very often a couple of hours at a time in more remote areas just to get to the test and then regardless of whether they have passed or failed they will then have to travel back for an equal amount of time. We do not think that is terrible good, we do not think it is good that changes to the riding test that come in from October have forced a situation where the DSA's response is to not allow people the opportunity to take the test. The fear is that much as I suspect is happening amongst young people in some communities with car driving is that people simply will not take their test, take any training, take the compulsory basic training before they even start and we could see a rise in unlicensed, uninsured riding and driving as time goes on.

Q290 Graham Stringer: Mr Brown, on that point can you tell us what the current figures are for unlicensed, untaxed and uninsured motorcyclists compared to drivers?

Mr Brown: Sure. The stats are very patchy; the untaxed one happens to have been resolved very recently. The government statistics in some years were saying that almost half of motorcyclists were evading paying their tax; the change to the methodology - by which I mean that they actually say that they looked at photographic evidence for last year's survey - found that something like 6% of motorcyclists were evading paying their vehicle excise duty.

Q291 Graham Stringer: Obviously big discrepancies.

Mr Brown: Yes, and the Committee of Public Accounts has made that point. In terms of unlicensed and uninsured driving, because there has been no specific research done in that area on motorcyclists, it has always been assumed that it will follow similar trends to having no vehicle excise duty, so on that basis if you believe that distinction then it looks like it is going to be about 6%.

Q292 Graham Stringer: And it is about 2%, is it, for motor cars?

Mr Howard: I had always thought it was higher than that.

Q293 Graham Stringer: You are the expert.

Mr Howard: I always walk around with 1.2 million in my mind which I think is nearer to 5%.

Q294 Mr Martlew: Can I ask about the issue of tackling fatigue in bus drivers and lorry drivers? Is that a major problem?

Mr Sealey: Listening to your previous experts, they said that impairment was the big issue and they mentioned two specific things, drugs and alcohol, but the third impairment is fatigue, and we actually see that as a bigger problem. Certainly, some of the experts that we have spoken to from the Sleep Research Laboratory and that sort of thing say that in actual fact driving if you are fatigued is actually more dangerous than if you are driving under the influence of alcohol or drugs.

Q295 Mr Martlew: Do you think it is a problem?

Mr Sealey: We are convinced it is a major problem.

Q296 Mr Martlew: Mr Semple, what is the Road Haulage Association doing about it?

Mr Semple: In terms of fatigue I think drivers would tell you that there is as much of a problem around the first hour to hour and a half where there is a fatigue issue rather than towards the end of the day. I think that is a pretty clear understanding on drivers that is borne out by research where there is very clear understanding that if you are too tired to drive you should not drive. That said, in terms of government responsibility we are very concerned about the lack of places to stop a truck, particularly secure truck stops, and there is a growing shortage of facilities in some urban areas - London is an absolutely classic - both to take your statutory four and a half hour driving break and also your overnight rest, so there is a problem there. I think also in some sectors of the industry it may be where you are starting at varying hours in the middle of the night, but that is perhaps on the wane in terms of how common that is, where you have can inconsistent start time.

Mr Sealey: On that one we believe in actual fact that the evidence is going the other way in regard to that. In our evidence we submitted we said that there is pressure on lorry bans in areas to reduce those lorry bans so that lorries can deliver into the night or early morning, and that is precisely the time that you are putting drivers into the period where their circadian rhythms are at their lowest.

Q297 Mr Martlew: What you are saying is that there is a pressure to have lorry drivers driving when normally they would be asleep.

Mr Sealey: Yes.

Mr Semple: There is an issue of night driving which I think is not so much of an issue actually. There is a lot of driving at night, but the issue that I was referring to more was differing start times so that you start at one o'clock inn the morning one night and four o'clock in the morning the next day, so it is an inconsistent start time. The other huge issue which I will just mention very briefly is foreign lorry drivers who come into the UK, suddenly they are on the wrong side of the road, they are towards the end of a long journey, unfamiliar road conditions. If you were to say where is the issue in terms of fatigue in truck operations on UK roads it is very clearly in that area for existing lorry drivers.

Q298 Mr Martlew: More and more of us are seeing an increase in the number of vans delivering goods in actual fact; is that a problem for road safety?

Mr Sealey: Before I answer that one, we have mentioned lorries but what we have not done is really mention bus drivers as well which was part of your original question. In a sense the domestic hours rules mean they are in a worse position because they can go five and a half hours without a break rather than four and a half like a professional driver. It is interesting that the Government's own advice is that you should not drive for much more than two hours without taking a break, and I am not aware of any company that actually applies that standard. Going to the bus drivers, it is five and a half hours but in their case they are under the domestic hours rules and so they can actually get as little as an weight-hour break between shifts. If you take it that they have to get home, undress and that sort of thing, they could get a very small amount of rest between shifts, and they are driving people. The increase in the number of vans is a concern and we see this as partly a result of the introduction of the Road Transport Working Time Directive where employers are going just under the weight limit with vans to avoid the road transport working time limit and they can go up to a maximum of 78 hours working without any regulation.

Q299 Mr Martlew: So there is a get-out clause.

Mr Sealey: Yes.

Mr Semple: On the two-hour guidance that is given, that is focused very much on motorists. The issue of vans - there is a proliferation of vans which has been driven to some degree by what my colleague was saying but to a much greater degree by the increase in home delivery. We are going to see a huge explosion in home delivery vans where there is going to be a requirement - I do not think fatigue is so much going to be an issue - for the people driving those vans to be familiar with driving vehicles that are much bigger than a car, in an urban area, around housing estates. Finally, on commercial vehicles, if I could just get back in terms of the road safety outcomes, the safety record of the industry - which is the acid test if you like - is good and getting better and I believe will get better.

Q300 Mr Martlew: Can I come to something that you may all agree on, I do not know. Mobility scooters: are they an increasing road safety problem or is nobody bothered about it?

Mr Howard: It is basically unquantifiable and takes you back to all the older driver issues and how you equate the importance of someone's mobility against their safety and also of course poses the problem of whether people would not give up driving if they had problems going to a mobility scooter. I at the moment have no data at all about the extent of the problem.

Mr Sealey: I think there is a problem for both road users and also for pedestrians because mobility scooters can be on the path as well, so they are just as big a problem for pedestrians as they are for drivers. One of the problems we do get is especially with bus drivers and bus lanes, mobility scooters using bus lanes.

Q301 Mrs Ellman: What role can targets play in reducing casualties? Do you think targets are effective?

Mr Howard: The 32 targets have certainly concentrated the road safety officer's mind; you never hear people at work in local authority road safety not talking about their targets but whether they have caught on with the public I do not know. I suspect that the first one might have rung the odd bell but since then we have had so many targets that I wonder any longer whether it has the appeal to the public that the first one did and perhaps it may be that one very important argument for a vision would be that it actually would be something different to a target and perhaps that would mean we could try and communicate it to the public.

Q302 Mrs Ellman: A vision instead of a target?

Mr Howard: A vision as well as a target, but I have a feeling that by the time we have had all the various targets that people have talked about today it is not going to be something that is going to be terribly easy to expect the man on the Clapham omnibus to remotely understand what we are talking about and what we are saying to the road safety industry.

Mr Semple: You could set a target but how you implement it, how you go about getting to that, may be a different thing. By all means set a target which is informed by more information than we possibly have at the moment and a clearer understanding, but how you then communicate the target I think is a different issue. If you possibly take a different route a target maybe becomes slightly secondary to changing the culture of ideas. In the haulage industry, very briefly, targets have been adopted more and more by companies undergoing risk assessments and as a way of reducing their insurance bills and their damage. That has been quite successful.

Q303 Mrs Ellman: Would you like to see targets made local rather than national, say at a local borough level?

Mr Semple: We are going to see targets set at a local level by local authorities. TfL, for example, is very keen on producing targets and is going to produce targets; I have to say at the same time over the last 18 years the reports submitted to TfL this year showed a 70% reduction in KSIs in terms of commercial vehicles and a 49% reduction in minor injuries, so the industry in the operating environment nationally and in terms of culture has achieved quite a lot without local targets but I think inevitably we are going to see targets set by local authorities.

Q304 Mrs Ellman: What level of risk should we be aiming for? Can we eliminate risk or should we perhaps have to accept risk?

Mr Heymer: You can never eliminate risk entirely. As soon as an object is put into motion it has kinetic energy and if it goes out of control it can cause damage. As long as we have road transport, therefore, we cannot eliminate risk entirely but it is a matter of trying to reduce it to a sensible level without impeding people's used of the road network to an undue degree.

Mr Brown: The difficulty with targets and with trying to assess risk is not only that it is sometimes difficult to get meaningful data to measure it by, it is also a question that because we live in a very diverse society and people's needs vary from one part of the country to the next, finding a broad target that is going to suit everybody's needs and everybody's rights is a very difficult thing to do. The problem is if you get people then chasing targets without the proper resources to achieve a constructive way of dealing with it, you get people finding ways of meeting the targets almost by cheating. The professor in the first period mentioned the possibility that vulnerable road users could be removed from the road in some places in order to reduce their casualties; that might meet the target but it has not improved road safety or reduced risk.

Q305 Graham Stringer: What should the alcohol limit be for driving? Should it stay at 80 mg, go down to 50, zero?

Mr Heymer: The ABD believes that the current limit is about right because it was based on scientific studies back in the 1960s and the main problem we have at the moment is people drinking above that limit and perceiving that they have little risk of being caught. This goes back to the roads policing issue that we discussed earlier; there need to be more police on the roads rather than the automated enforcement that is currently in vogue to give people a much greater perception that they are likely to be caught if they exceed the limit. If the limit were reduced I think the main problem we would see is in the morning after situation where responsible people avoid driving if they know they are going to drink, but then the next morning they could find themselves with a residual alcohol level over the limit. The evidence shows that for a given blood alcohol concentration the risk posed by the person as a driver is lower when the level is coming down than when it is going up, so somebody could get up the next morning with, perhaps, 51 or 52 milligrams in their blood, feel absolutely fine and probably be absolutely fine and yet still be breaking the law.

Mr Sealey: Again, we are in a slightly different position with professional drivers. Certainly our experience in the bus industry is that we have reached a number of agreements with the major companies on drugs and alcohol policy as to whether there is random testing. There is clear recognition with our members that they cannot come in in that position of drinking even the night before because they know that they could come into work and fail the random test.

Q306 Graham Stringer: These internal tests are set at 80 milligrams are they?

Mr Sealey: Yes. It changes the whole culture of the industry for people who certainly would have gone out the night before and had a drink, they are much more likely now to maybe not drink for 24 hours before they drive, so it has had a major impact on them. We would like to see that extended much more into the road transport industry; some of the major employers are doing it but it would be a useful exercise to expand it to road transport as well.

Q307 Mr Martlew: Just on that, do you believe that the penalties for drinking and driving are the right ones, the loss of licence?

Mr Heymer: They are probably right with the current limit, but if the limit were reduced you would need to look perhaps at a system such as that in some European countries where you do not have such a draconian penalty for being a small amount above the limit.

Mr Howard: I can safely say that with over two-thirds of our members saying we should reduce the legal limit, the time has come when we can no longer stand in the way of a reduction. At the same stage we would want to point out that we suspect that many of them think that reductions in deaths will come from the worst and most serious, top of the range drink drivers, not from the people at the bottom, and would be very concerned that when the limit changes it is enforced in such a way that we continue to concentrate resources on the people right at the top who are most likely to kill and are still doing the majority of the killing.

Q308 Graham Stringer: When you say you want it reduced, is it the AA's view that it should be 50 or zero?

Mr Howard: The AA's view in writing is that we would not object to a reduction in the legal limit to 50.

Mr Semple: I think I am right in saying that if thou are a professional driver and you get convicted of drink driving you lose the ability to earn your living from professional driving so it is a complete non-starter, the culture will become even stronger but it is already very strong.

Mr Brown: Certainly the culture amongst motorcyclists has turned very much against it progressively over the last 20 years. If you look at the involvement of motorcyclists in drink driving fatalities, there has been a steady decline over 20 years in a way that there has not been for car drivers. A lot of the issues around drink driving which we quite often think of as being a rural sort of issue also relate very much to urban areas. The amount of collisions with pedestrians and vehicles as a result of a pedestrian having had rather too much to drink is a worrying social trend and it is just another example of the way that society operates. It has fallen within the road safety sphere but it is not necessarily something that road safety legislation can immediately attack.

Mr Sealey: There is another issue which is in a sense more drug-related and that is over-the-counter drugs which can be a problem for drivers because they cause drowsiness and that sort of thing. That is an area that we do need to look at, especially with professional drivers again because of the pressure to be at work because there are shortages of drivers and so on. That would tend to indicate that they may be using these medicines and that sort of thing to keep them going, but there is a down side in terms of the drowsiness and the effect on their ability to drive.

Graham Stringer: On that note can I thank you all for spending time with us this afternoon.