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Lord Bradshaw moved Amendment No. 2:
"ROAD ACCIDENTS INVESTIGATION BOARD
(1) There shall be established a board, to be called the Road Accident Investigation Board ("the Board"), whose purpose shall be to improve road safety by determining the causes of road accidents where—
(a) a specified number of serious accidents occurs over a specified period on a specified stretch of road, and
(b) identifiable common factors make investigation necessary.
(2) The Board shall have neither responsibility for apportioning blame or liability nor for enforcing the law or carrying out prosecutions."
The noble Lord said: My Lords, I hesitate to raise this at Third Reading because I admit that it is a new issue, but we have touched several times on the fact that the means by which the Government investigate accidents in aviation, shipping and on the railways are very thorough indeed. In fact, inquiries into an accident are conducted not by a prosecuting body, but one whose job it is to establish the cause and to recommend various measures to prevent it happening again.
I will not go into the history at Third Reading, but since the Transport and Road Research Laboratory disappeared, no body is now charged with investigating the causes of road accidents on a systematic basis. I do not suggest that every road accident needs to be inquired into exhaustively because that would take a lot of time, but where trends emerge regarding the vehicle, the piece of road or the particular situation that are common to a series of accidents, there is a strong case for charging a body to investigate such accidents and to make recommendations to vehicle manufacturers, those maintaining the roads or others involved in setting up safety measures on the steps that should be taken to mitigate the problem.
The proposed new clause is in effect a probing amendment to ask the Minister whether the Government have considered this and whether it is the kind of proposal to which they could turn their attention when the Bill is considered in another place. I beg to move.
Lord Berkeley: My Lords, I support the amendment although I regret that it has come before us only at Third Reading. As the noble Lord, Lord Bradshaw, has just said, when noble Lords consider the newly established rail accident investigation body, along with those for aviation and marine incidents which have been around for much longer, they will agree that they have been a remarkable success. Not only have they helped to reduce accidents, they have also been able to establish their causes and to present the lessons learnt in a non-confrontational way. That is terribly important.
We need to reflect on the fact that over 3,500 people are killed on the roads every year, probably 100 times as many as those killed on the railways or in maritime
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and air incidents. It is therefore ironic that the means of transport which yields by far the greatest number of accidents resulting in death or serious injury—and the enormous pain and suffering attached to those—is the one mode which does not have an accident investigation board. I trust that my noble friend will look with favour on the ideas behind this proposed new clause.
Lord Renton: My Lords, I regret to say that I cannot agree with this amendment because it seems unnecessary. The Minister already has plenty of power to collect information that becomes available on various kinds of motor accidents. In any event, the amendment itself is very strangely worded. The purpose of the board would be to,
But there is plenty of opportunity to do that already. Moreover, the new clause suggests a "specified number of serious accidents" that are unspecified, "over a specified period" that is unspecified, which take place "on a specified stretch of road". Does that mean that only accidents over particular stretches of road are to be considered relevant? That seems to me to be a wrong purpose.
"The Board shall have neither responsibility for apportioning blame or liability nor for enforcing the law or carrying out prosecutions".
Making such a provision when an obligation has been placed on a department surely means that you are depriving the department of expressing its opinions.
There are various other ways in which this amendment seems quite unsuitable. I certainly hope that the Government will not support it and that your Lordships will not vote for it.
Lord Hanningfield: My Lords, I agree with a great deal of what my noble friend Lord Renton has said, but there is some merit in the amendment. Obviously powers already exist. I do not like to keep repeating in the House what happens in my own county council, but the county council highways service certainly investigates every major road accident problem in the county. We have a target of reducing deaths in Essex by a half over the next few years and we have a programme of spending money on black spots. There is a considerable black spot in my own constituency on which we have just agreed a programme. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Bradshaw, that I am surprised that that does not happen in Oxfordshire.
Certainly we will reduce deaths in Essex. We will spend money on those black spots and we will investigate all areas where there are major road problems. Any responsible local authority with a highways duty should do that. That is—going back to localism and what happens in a local area—something that we should probably encourage, more so than
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establishing a lot of national quangos or making national laws. It is in what happens locally that a great many of these problems could be solved.
Earl Attlee: My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Bradshaw, has moved an interesting amendment with which I have some sympathy. The amendment provides that the board does not apportion blame. A disadvantage with the current arrangements, which are police-led investigations, is that motorists involved in accidents are very reluctant to be completely frank. It is a little late in the progress of the Bill to look at this issue in detail, but some form of confidentiality arrangements may be beneficial. At an earlier stage, the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, and I tabled amendments about black boxes. They would also be helpful in working out what actually went wrong in an accident.
My noble friend Lord Renton suggested that the Minister already has the necessary powers. The difficulty is that any activity by the department, by central government, would be confrontational—there would be a worry on the part of the motorist—whereas if a motorist involved in an accident knew that he was dealing with an impartial organisation that would not use his frank contributions to the investigation in a prosecution, he would inevitably be much more frank.
My noble friend also said that the proposed arrangements were unnecessary. If he is right, then the Marine Accident Investigation Branch and the Air Accidents Investigation Branch are also unnecessary, but I do not think anyone would want to scrap them. However, it is a little late in the Bill to look in detail at this.
The Earl of Dundee: My Lords, I, too, support the amendment. Certainly it comes a little late, as has been pointed out, and my noble friend Lord Renton has drawn our attention to certain inconsistencies in the words and the purport of the amendment. But surely it would be an excellent thing—in the same way as we have branches for accidents in the air, at sea and on the railways—to have a branch with a similar remit for accidents on the road, not least to identify common trends and to recommend solutions. Therefore, I believe that such a body would succeed in complementing the existing work of the police and local authorities.
3.30 pm
Lord Davies of Oldham: My Lords, I am grateful to noble Lords who have spoken. However, as a probing amendment, this is a little late, as the noble Earl, Lord Attlee, indicated. That does not mean that we cannot take it seriously but this is the first time the issue has arisen in this respect.
The proposal seems to ally the concept of the Rail Accident Investigation Branch with what happens on the roads. The same could be said of other modes of transport, such as marine transport. Marine and rail accidents are few and far between; they are very serious
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when they occur. Quite frequently there are technical lessons to be learnt from them, and human error is often of quite a low order.
Everyone in the House, particularly those who have spoken in these debates and have a great knowledge of road safety issues, knows that there are a very large number of accidents. Last year there were 2,978 accidents involving a fatality. The numbers involved are of a very different order of magnitude from those involved in railway accidents. A very large number involve human error. Technical and mechanical failures are of a relatively low order in accidents, although lessons are learnt about the issues the noble Lord, Lord Hanningfield, described, such as accident black spots. Local authorities and local police are best placed to make judgments about those.
Of course accidents are investigated very carefully by police forces. Wherever a fatality occurs, they are obliged to do so because they need to consider the possibility that charges may be brought against someone involved in the accident. Local authorities are apprised and aware of where accidents occur. The local community is very alert to accident black spots. In fact, it often identifies areas which are not black spots but which cause concern given the potential for accidents. We recognise that local authorities play a very significant role. The police carry out their investigations. As the noble Lord, Lord Renton, said, a range of resources is available to the authorities in examining the causes of accidents. In addition, our department carries out research into accidents and academic studies are made of them. We are not short of evidence in identifying factors which contribute to accidents.
We all aspire to a situation in which safety on the roads is comparable to that of the railway, air or marine industries. We all recognise why that is a difficult objective. We are far from achieving it because of the very large number of people who drive on the roads and the human factor involved. We cannot draw easy comparisons between the undoubted effectiveness of the investigations into rail, marine and air accidents and say that this concept could be easily translated to the thousands of accidents which happen, regrettably, on British roads during the year.
Although we do not see the need for the body the noble Lord has proposed, I assure him that we take very seriously the necessity for examination of and research into accidents and for the identification of factors which can increase road safety. There is always a great deal to be learnt from accidents. As we have indicated in this debate, those with direct responsibility—often local authorities rather than central government—take action to ensure that there is improvement at accident black spots. I hope that the noble Lord will feel reassured and able to withdraw his amendment.
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