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Road Safety Bill [HL]

My Lords, I shall refer specifically to the question of injuries. The Minister said that it was about injuries that the consultation had taken place with various legal officers, the Bar Council and others, not about death by dangerous driving. Amendment No. 63 is a probing amendment; we wanted to know where injuries stood in the scale of things. I can accept that there is a very wide variation in degree of injury between people who suffer a cut or a graze and, at the other extreme, somebody who ends up in a vegetative state. I know that the Minister will go away and think about what has been said tonight. I ask him to reconsider whether there is a degree of life-changing injury—if a person ends up minus a limb or in a wheelchair and is permanently injured, for example—that will lead to their case being considered special? I am not talking about trivial injuries. On the rest of the amendments, it must now be apparent to the Minister that there is great unease about the custodial element of the punishments proposed for careless driving. I do not consider tiredness, where somebody is dropping asleep, as being careless driving. The person should take a rest. We are told to do that often enough. But where the offence is genuinely a momentary lapse, further consideration should certainly be given to the range of community sentences to which the noble Viscount, Lord Tenby, referred, because prisons are overcrowded and sending somebody to prison brings in its train all kinds of other problems such as who is to support the prisoner’s family and who is to look after his children. It is a devastating situation with which to be confronted. There may be people who go to prison habitually, but the vast majority of us regard it as something with which we would certainly not wish to get involved. So when the Minister sums up, will he answer these questions? I shall not press Amendment No. 63. It is simply a probing amendment to discover whether there is any degree of injury which the Minister considers should be included in those things which we have discussed.