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Road Safety Bill [Lords]

Road safety is a policy area that has benefited immeasurably from cross-party consensus for many years. For decades, Labour and Conservative Governments have adopted the approach of long-term strategy tied to demanding targets for casualty reduction. Over that time, there has been great success in achieving those targets. It is remarkable that we have reduced in absolute terms the numbers of people killed or seriously injured on our roads over two decades in which the amount of traffic on our roads has continued to grow every year. As policy makers, we are entitled to congratulate ourselves on some success, but we need to ponder the amount of death and carnage still seen on our roads. More than 3,000 lives are lost every year, with 10 times that number seriously injured. We are entitled to say that we have had successes and that our policy works, but more remains to be done. That is why we are debating a new Road Safety Bill today. We are keen, these days, on making decisions based on evidence. There is evidence that adding some measures to the Bill would save more lives. The first was mentioned by the right hon. Member for East Yorkshire (Mr. Knight). Changing the clocks—our time pieces, not the odometers on our cars—twice a year may be a wider issue than can be addressed by a road safety Bill, but the Transport Research Laboratory estimated in 1999 that having lighter evenings would save some 100 lives and prevent 2,000 serious and other injuries a year.