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Road Safety Bill [HL]

My Lords, I was going to speak in favour of the amendments when my noble friend introduced them.. Having heard comments from other noble Lords, I am afraid that I have to congratulate my noble friend even more. I believe that what he is doing is absolutely right. We have heard so many stories about momentary errors of judgment that people have to live with for ever. We have heard about poor mothers taking their children to school and youngsters on benefits. We are forgetting the victims, whose relations will suffer and remember this for ever. It is possible to drive carefully within the law by concentrating and keeping to the speed limit, and we have a duty of care to do that. I get the impression that a number of noble Lords feel, ““There but for the grace of God go I””. If this proposal gets people to drive more carefully—and it is not noble Lords who are the main cause of the problem, as we all know—it is a very good thing. One noble Lord mentioned the Health and Safety Executive and what would happen in a factory. None of us works in factories, so we would not know. The Health and Safety Executive does a great deal of good in factories; it has also done a great deal of good on the railways. It may have done too much good and spent too much money, but, in general, it has done a great deal of good. I have suggested for a number of years that it should be involved in road safety. If it was, and it applied the same rules to roads as it did to factories, we would all be driving at 20 miles an hour, which would save an awful lot of lives. I do not know whether the details of the amendments are right, but the sentiments are right. We must recognise that there is a demand for this, because we are still killing 3,500 people a year and seriously injuring 10 times that number. The amendments are a major contribution to reducing that number, and I shall certainly support them.