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Road Safety Bill [HL]

My Lords, we could have predicted an interesting debate on this group of amendments and that has certainly been the case. I shall limit my reply if only because my opening contribution was of an inordinate length and it attempted to cover as many of the arguments that I could anticipate would be put forward both against the Government’s amendments and in favour of those that were tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Monson, to which other noble Lords have spoken. The House will recognise that this is a serious debate and that while I want to be clear in my answers, I do not want to rehearse all the issues with which I tried to deal in my opening contribution. I thank the noble and learned Lord, Lord Lyell, for his comment on the extent of the Government’s determination to make our roads safer by making people more aware of appropriate speed limits. I am grateful for his support for the Government in this activity. He will recognise that I quite frankly said in my opening statement that the legal profession largely disagreed with us. He, in his customarily courteous but forceful way, articulated exactly those arguments. I can say only that we have considered them very carefully. Copies of the consultation exercise to which I referred have been placed in Library of the House and can be examined there, but I made no bones about the fact that anxieties were expressed in many quarters of the law about these proposals during the consultation exercise. But the Government intend to proceed, because, during that exercise, we received very substantial support. This is a road safety Bill and our job is to promote road safety by way of it. The road safety organisations, among others, were very forceful in their support for what we intended to do. I might add—I shudder to do so in the presence of the noble Lord, Lord Tebbit, because it will not be a satisfactory answer to him—that we included this concept in our manifesto only four to five months ago. I have heard it expressed on all sides that we should not be so crudely populist, but there are certain areas of sentencing policy where we do not automatically take the public’s view and translate that into law. I of course recognise the age-long debates about the death penalty. We said in our manifesto that we would introduce much tougher penalties for those who cause death by careless driving or who kill while driving without a licence or while disqualified. We are fulfilling that commitment. We have the right to say that we have received substantial public support for this amendment. So I concede that I will not persuade the noble and learned Lord, Lord Lyell, with this argument because he articulated an entirely different one about the anxieties of lawyers. We have considered their representations in full and we intend to go ahead because we think that the one argument triumphs over the other.