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Road Safety

I hope that we will be able to achieve the objective that my hon. Friend the Member for Newport, West (Paul Flynn) mentions of saving more young lives. The previous Chair of the Transport Committee exhorted us to take in account the urgency of the situation. The proposals we published in our ““Learning to Drive”” document were awaited by people for some time, which held up progress to this kind of discussion. However, we published that document within weeks of the debate in the Transport Committee. It is in the public domain and it will clearly allow us to arrive at conclusions. Whether we grasp the nettle to which my hon. Friend alluded—I shall come to some of the points he made in a moment—the objective is to improve the situation still further. As I said, before becoming Minister for road safety I used to talk about accidents, but now I talk about crashes. Too many people who become casualties have not followed basic rules. For example, my hon. Friends the Members for Pendle and for Newport, West, mentioned seat belts. Research suggests that road fatalities have been cut by about 1,000 every year by the requirement for wearing a seat belt, but a quarter of vehicle occupants involved in fatalities did not use seat belts. Research demonstrates that up to two-thirds of those people might otherwise survive. Car loads of young people are among those with especially low belt-wearing rates: too many pay a tragic price for neglecting to do so, and we plan a new campaign in October to address that challenge. Turning to our reforms, there is a strong case for overhauling the way in which people learn to drive and the way in which we test their skills. We must ensure that new drivers can deal with the challenge of driving alone. We know, from talking to young people, that the vast majority want to be safe and responsible, but we do not give them the tools to do so. Too many of them overestimate their abilities. They are impatient to strike out on their own, but that does not mean that they intend to be reckless or unsafe—far from it; the vast majority of young drivers are safe and responsible. The present driving test is too narrowly focused: the fundamentals go back to the 1930s. The mechanics of manoeuvring a car are important, but there is a lot more to driving on crowded modern roads. We plan a new approach based on improved education, better testing and real incentives to continue learning after the test. We want to change the driving test to base it on a new, comprehensive guide to what makes drivers safe. We want to update the theory test and the hazard perception test to encourage broader learning and test understanding of safe driving. We want the practical test to be better at assessing whether people are ready to drive unsupervised. We are considering splitting the theory and practical tests into modules, to enable learners to pass elements of the test as they learn. We want to provide people with better feedback throughout the testing process. Young people have told us that they want to learn about driving and using the road before they get behind the wheel, so we are developing a foundation course in safe road use, aimed at young people still in school. On average, learners spend about £1,500 learning to drive, which is a big outlay for young people, who are keen to get better value. Young people complain that learners do not have sufficient information to plan their training properly or to choose the best driving instructor available. We will give learners a better idea of what is required through a new syllabus, which will also help instructors and others who are helping learners to practise, and a workbook to give them a much better understanding of what they need to learn and why. We want to encourage people to demonstrate that they have driven in a wide range of conditions such as at night or in bad weather. The hon. Member for Cheadle (Mark Hunter) raised both those points, and I will return to them when I respond, at the end of my speech, to comments made in the debate. I commend the pre-pass support scheme developed by Lancashire county council, which is just the sort of positive measure we seek to help learners and the family members who are helping them with driving practice. We want to give learners better information about driving instructors through a star rating system, so that they do not have to rely on family and friends for recommendations. We are reviewing the way in which instructors are trained and tested, before they qualify and after they are registered, to help them all to offer the best tuition possible. The practical test is seen as the end of formal learning, and learners are not encouraged to continue developing their skills. We want to create incentives to learn in new ways, both pre- and post-test, to gain bankable additional qualifications. We want to develop additional qualifications to supplement the driving licence, working with employers and insurers. Our consultation document explains why we are not proposing restrictions on newly qualified drivers. Briefly, if we have to impose restrictions on people after they have passed their driving test, we have failed to train and test them properly. I recognise that newly qualified drivers have too many accidents.