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Road Safety Bill [HL]

My Lords, I do not think I have an interest to declare in this matter but I shall declare one anyway as an employee of the National Express Group. Like previous speakers I do not wish to repeat anything I said at an earlier stage of the Bill, but I do wish to register, first, my support for the amendments and, secondly, my disappointment at the apparent reluctance of the Government to see the sensible reasons for these amendments. The history of the railways over the past 150 or 160 years shows that we have succeeded in reducing the risks of accidents enormously. The potential for errors for signalmen has been drastically reduced in recent years, for example. Although it is still possible for drivers to misread signals and cause accidents, modernisation, electrification and the provision of modern signalling has, if not eradicated, enormously reduced accidents caused by drivers’ errors. But there is one area in which we have not succeeded in reducing the number of accidents. Indeed, in recent years, the number of accidents at level crossings has actually increased. That is partly as a result of the vast increase in road traffic and partly of the more cavalier attitude of many of our driving fraternity. If we are to tackle the problem of level crossing accidents, two things ought to be done. First, in accordance with Amendment No. 50, highway authorities ought to accept far more responsibility for the protection of level crossings than they do at present. I do not underestimate the power of the driving lobby in this country. Some daily newspapers appear to be obsessed by an organisation called the Association of British Drivers. I have never heard of these people as individuals, but collectively they appear to have enormous influence on transport policy in the United Kingdom. The Daily Mail finds it impossible to talk about any aspect of our transport policy without quoting some representative of, as I refer to them, the petrol-head fraternity. The fact is that for many years, motorists have been getting away with the sort of behaviour at level crossings that causes accidents. There was one particular accident recently which it would be improper of me to go into detail about, but from what I have read and from what I have heard from my contacts in the railway industry, it would appear that the driver of the road vehicle involved in that accident, who was tragically killed as a result, had zigzagged round a half-barrier level crossing. That sort of behaviour is by no means unusual—it happens, I would have thought, fairly regularly in various parts of the country. It is long past the time that highway authorities accepted far greater responsibility for level crossing safety and protection. Secondly, I spoke at an earlier stage of the Bill about bridge bashing. Trains these days, particularly the ones that I and some of my noble friends use most often on the West Coast Main Line, are faster and lighter than the trains that previously ran. They are multiple unit trains, to all intents and purposes, although I dare say the purists would not like them to be so called. If we have a serious bridge bashing incident on the West Coast Main Line, the potential for disaster, because of these faster and lighter trains is, in my view and that of people far more expert than I, greatly increased. The department ought to look far more seriously at the penalties for the sort of conduct that we see all too often. Bridge bashing in a particular area has been referred to; in an earlier stage of the Bill’s proceedings, I referred to a bridge at Brandon, just south of Coventry, where the line speed restriction is 100 miles per hour. The bridge is regularly struck and trains are regularly stopped for hours at a time while a thorough inspection is carried out. Sooner or later, some bridge, if not that one, will be so badly struck as to displace the railway line, leading to a tragedy. Ministers will say, and newspapers will demand, that the maximum amount of money be spent on ensuring that this sort of thing does not happen again. We could do something to prevent it if the punishments were more adequate than they are and if local authorities, as well as individual drivers, accepted far more responsibility for their actions.