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Road Safety Bill [Lords]

Let me make a bit of progress. I judge from the mood of the House that people can smell their dinners and that they do not want to be here all night. I shall make some progress before I give way. The hon. Gentleman also talked about people failing to stop after an accident, but I did not understand whether he was arguing that no law existed in that regard, or that the penalties were insufficient. I can tell him that failing to stop after an accident can already attract a six-month prison sentence, a £5,000 fine, a mandatory endorsement and a discretionary disqualification. It is already a serious offence, and clearly the law has to be enforced. The hon. Gentleman and several other hon. Members mentioned railway crossings. Several provisions on that matter were put into the Bill in the House of Lords, and we understand their purpose. However, we are not sure that they have really hit the mark or that they are necessary. There is clearly a case for the existing law on who is responsible for making improvements at level crossings to be clarified, and we intend to table amendments to that effect. However, most of the debate on that subject today was about the punishment for jumping red lights at level crossings. We shall consider those points carefully and discuss them in Committee to see whether there is an issue there. I saw just such an incident a few weeks ago when I was waiting in a traffic queue at a level crossing in my constituency. It was a level crossing with double barriers, but the diagonal single barriers came down first, and someone drove down the outside of the queue of traffic and gambled on being able to cross the line before the second set of barriers came down. That is clearly the kind of idiotic behaviour that the hon. Member for North Shropshire (Mr. Paterson) described earlier, and the law on that has to be enforced. At the moment, however, the penalties for that kind of behaviour are the same as those for going across a red light anywhere. If we are going to change that penalty, we need to widen the debate and ask whether the penalty for crossing red lights in general are tough enough, rather than limiting the discussion to level crossings. That is something that we shall consider carefully and bottom out in Committee. The new offence of causing death by careless driving that we want to create was mentioned by my hon. Friends the Members for Bolton, South-East (Dr. Iddon) and for Leicester, South (Sir Peter Soulsby), the hon. Members for Wellingborough (Mr. Bone) and for Forest of Dean (Mr. Harper), and, in particular, my hon. Friend the Member for Northampton, North (Ms Keeble), who has campaigned on that issue for many years. The tragic cases outlined by my hon. Friend the Member for Bolton, South-East explain more eloquently than I possibly could why we need to create the new offence. The hon. Member for Wellingborough made particular sense when he described the gap between the present offences of careless driving, which attracts a £2,500 fine and a possible ban—not even a mandatory one—and of dangerous driving, which attracts a mandatory ban, a substantial custodial sentence and other possible penalties that are available to the courts. That gap is clearly too big, and it needs to be filled. We shall have a debate about exactly how we structure that offence and the penalties that should apply, and I hope that the Conservatives will then withdraw any objection that they might have in principle. I hope that they will be convinced that the new provision can work in practice and that they will support us. We will certainly work hard to bottom that out with them in Committee. The hon. Member for Carshalton and Wallington (Tom Brake) mentioned a number of issues. He was the first to talk about the Red Cross in regard to first aid, although the right hon. Member for East Yorkshire (Mr. Knight) and one or two others also mentioned it. Let me remind the House that the theory test already includes a series of questions on first aid, so anyone who wants to be sure of passing that test needs to have swotted up on first aid. It is certainly the case that one does not automatically get a question on first aid because questions are chosen randomly from a body of questions available for the test. However, the questions are there, and one has to swot that area of expertise to be sure of passing the test.