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Road Safety Bill [HL]

My Lords, I agree with a great deal of what my noble friend Lord Renton has said, but there is some merit in the amendment. Obviously powers already exist. I do not like to keep repeating in the House what happens in my own county council, but the county council highways service certainly investigates every major road accident problem in the county. We have a target of reducing deaths in Essex by a half over the next few years and we have a programme of spending money on black spots. There is a considerable black spot in my own constituency on which we have just agreed a programme. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Bradshaw, that I am surprised that that does not happen in Oxfordshire. Certainly we will reduce deaths in Essex. We will spend money on those black spots and we will investigate all areas where there are major road problems. Any responsible local authority with a highways duty should do that. That is—going back to localism and what happens in a local area—something that we should probably encourage, more so than establishing a lot of national quangos or making national laws. It is in what happens locally that a great many of these problems could be solved.