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Road Safety Bill [HL]

My Lords, I have added my name to the amendment. It is now almost universally agreed that the law as it stands does not provide for adequate penalties for causing death by careless driving. The penalties need to be stiffened up with higher maximum fines, the possibility of imposing a community service order and, above all, automatic disqualification for a minimum period of 12 months. The disqualification period could be substantially longer. As the noble Lord, Lord Hanningfield, said, the sticking point is imprisonment. Is imprisonment really appropriate for an act of simple carelessness, however grave the consequences, where no element of recklessness is involved? After all, no human being can be expected to remain at a state of maximum alert hour after hour. It is a pity but that is a law of nature. It can be argued that train drivers who drive through a signal set at red, skippers of ships who carry out a slipshod manoeuvre, and hospital doctors and nurses who inject the wrong solution into a patient’s vein, all resulting in death, are often charged with manslaughter, essentially for acts of carelessness, and, although frequently acquitted by juries, they are sometimes convicted. That is undeniably true but, in practice, such convictions rarely seem to result in actual sentences as distinct from suspended sentences of more than about 12 months. That is why I submit that if custody is to be an option—and it is a big ““if””—then a two-year maximum is appropriate. There is a further important reason for this two-year maximum. As I argued at some length on Report, if a five-year maximum were put in place, the public and the increasingly vocal media would expect everyone convicted of this offence to be sent to prison as a matter of course, even if only for a year or two, and they would explode with rage and indignation if anyone were merely fined or given a community service order. A two-year maximum, on the other hand, would subliminally indicate that prison was reserved for the relatively few cases where the careless driving had bordered on reckless or dangerous. On Report, I proposed a somewhat higher—three-year—maximum in the hope that the Government might find that an acceptable compromise. However, alas, that was not to be. The Minister, the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Oldham, indicated a willingness to compromise on the maximum at Third Reading, but so far the Government have not come up with a compromise amendment of their own. Since Report, I have been persuaded by the weight of judicial and other highly experienced legal opinion that imprisonment of any length should not be an option at all for this offence—hence the adding of my name to this amendment. However, if the majority of your Lordships are not persuaded by the force of this argument, my Amendment No. 6 remains as a fallback compromise option.