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Road Safety Bill [HL]

My Lords, I apologise for returning to the Chamber late. I strongly oppose Amendments Nos. 19 and 29, but I have no problem with Amendment No. 20 because, as noble Lords have identified, there is a criminal intent when the motorist starts driving without insurance. However, I do not blame the Minister. He is not in control. I do not think that anyone is in control of the Home Office. I am sure that if the Minister had intended these provisions to be in the Bill he would have had them in at Second Reading. Even if it was not his intention, he would have tabled an amendment for Committee stage. The work of the Home Office is clear for all to see. The problem is that your Lordships have worked on the Bill on the basis that no significant changes would be made to the two most important bad driving offences; namely, careless driving and dangerous driving. I doubt whether many noble Lords have spent much time studying them. I certainly have not. It is clear that the Home Office has responded to pressures from the road safety lobby and the public, but one wonders how members of the public will react when they find that their best friend, an upstanding member of society, has had a ghastly accident and now finds himself being prosecuted for a very serious offence. While on the issue of public opinion, we should remember that public opinion supports hanging, but I suspect that few in your Lordships’ House would support its reintroduction. The difficulty is that many of those involved in these organisations have suffered personal tragedy. First, they want to reduce the chance of tragedy occurring to someone else, which is laudable. Secondly, however, they want to see someone else pay, and pay dearly. In fact, they want to see them go to prison, even for a minor transgression. But I do not want to belittle the efforts of the road safety lobby. If it were not for those efforts, we probably would not have the Bill at all. While we all understand the mischief that it is very hard to secure a conviction for causing death by dangerous driving, it is quite easy to do so for careless driving—even, or perhaps especially, in the case of a fatality. But I can think of no activity outside of Her Majesty’s Armed Forces where ordinary people, through a moment’s inattention, can cause a fatal accident. In a factory, a process that results in fatal consequences because of a minor omission or slight error of judgment would simply not be tolerated. The HSE would impose an immediate prohibition on that process. Noble Lords may not realise what a big change the Minister’s amendment will make. To secure a conviction for dangerous driving, whether for a fatal accident or not, under Section 2A of the Road Traffic Act 1988 as amended by the 1991 Act, the prosecution has to show that the person’s driving was far below the standard expected of a competent and careful driver and—this is most important—that it would be obvious to a competent and careful driver that driving in that way would be dangerous. That test does not apply to the offence of careless driving. If this test could be applied to the new offence, it might go some way towards alleviating our concerns. We are going to create a very serious offence which would attract penalties similar to a serious assault; that is, imprisonment for up to five years, an unlimited fine and obligatory disqualification. But the failure would be merely to have driven without due care and attention. There would be no need to prove a guilty or negligent intent. In most criminal law, sentences take into account the consequences of the offence. However, in those cases the offender starts out with a criminal intent. Motorists do not normally do so. The mother taking her children to school does not intend to commit a criminal act. That is rather different from the person driving an uninsured vehicle who then kills someone, a point covered by government Amendment No. 20, to which I think most noble Lords will agree. But the mother may make a simple error by failing to check her mirror at the right moment. In emerging from a side road she looks to the right, but does not see the motorcycle. Perhaps it is dark and the motorcycle headlight is exactly superimposed on to the headlight of an oncoming vehicle, but of course the motorcycle is much closer. I have made precisely that mistake myself on a straight road. Fortunately no accident took place, but I did have an interesting discussion with the police motorcyclist involved. Humble pie tastes delicious. Going back to the mother taking her children to school, perhaps she does unfortunately cause the death of a motorcyclist. Of course she would be devastated. And maybe some 10 months earlier she ran into the back of a police car, so that she has already acquired a conviction for careless driving. For how long is it proposed to send her to prison? There are other difficulties here which have been identified by the noble Lord, Lord Monson. The jury might be extremely reluctant to convict while the defendant would certainly fight the charge very hard indeed, and not only because of the penalties. Although the Minister said that the sentence might not be that severe in a minor case, the defendant would still be convicted of causing death by careless driving. No one would want to bear that stigma. Perhaps they would be willing to accept that they had caused a fatal accident and therefore would accept the charge of careless driving rather than resist the charge; but causing death by careless driving sounds very serious to me. The noble Lord, Lord Monson, had it right when he used the words, ““There but for the grace of God go I””. Moreover, in the event of a fatal accident surely it would be inappropriate only to bring a charge of careless driving. If an accident results in a fatality, the charge would have to be that of causing death by careless driving every time. What of the youngster on benefits who has committed his first offence? He cannot be fined very much because of his low income. There is a limit on how long he can be given to pay and how much he can pay each week, so the fine will be paltry. The only option left to the court may be a custodial sentence, perhaps suspended. What about the case of one accident where the failure in driving is minor but the consequences are fatal, and another accident where the failure is gross but does not result in a conviction for dangerous driving, nor one for causing death by careless driving because the victim has not died, but has been turned into a paraplegic for the rest of his life? These amendments are extremely unwelcome and I hope that the Minister will withdraw them in order to think again. If not, we will have to come back at Third Reading with some attempt to try to mitigate their worst effects.