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Road Safety Bill [Lords]

I may have given the impression earlier that I am some kind of expert on road humps and, if that is the case, I apologise for misleading the House. There may well be a case for standardising sizes and lengths of road humps and my hon. Friend may well have an excellent case, but I am not qualified to offer her an opinion on that. There is another point that I want to mention, and I appreciate the range that you have allowed to Members taking part in the debate, Mr. Deputy Speaker, because these are important issues, although they are not specifically mentioned in the Bill. A new practice that has unfortunately become more widespread in the past 15 or 20 years, although it was not heard of many years ago, is residents parking their cars on pavements. When I worked as a press officer for Strathclyde regional council many years ago, it was interesting that many of the residents who demanded road humps for their area were exactly the same people who parked their cars on pavements that were supposed to be used by pedestrians. Road engineers had, and have, a sensible response to the practice. If people park their cars on the road—where they belong—and thus reduce the width of a residential road, through traffic must slow down so that it can navigate the road safely. It makes absolutely no sense to widen a road by parking on the area intended for pedestrians and at the same time to ask for road humps. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State was absolutely correct to say that the UK has a good road safety record, although he was also right to say that it is not good enough and that we must improve it. I sometimes fear that society in this country sees more than 3,000 deaths a year as an acceptable level of violence, although I know that my right hon. Friend would not subscribe to that sentiment, far less give voice to it, which is just as well given that when Reginald Maudling, a previous Conservative Home Secretary, used the phrase in the House, he was promptly attacked by Miss Bernadette Devlin—I do not propose such a course of action today. There is no other aspect of public life in this country in which more than 3,000 deaths a year would be remotely acceptable or tolerated. If that number of deaths occurred on the railways or British domestic airlines, the situation would not be allowed to continue. The hon. Member for Carshalton and Wallington (Tom Brake) talked about the number of people who are devoted to examining safety on the railways and airlines. We, as a society, have come to accept the number of deaths, but that should be at the root of our attempts to address the problem.