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Road Safety

I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention and agree with his sentiments. I hope that the Transport Committee's report will help focus public attention on what is indeed a national scandal. I should like to highlight some of the key issues in our report and the Government's response. The report links road safety with wider policies to do with improving the environment and health. It also focuses on a stark fact that has little recognition: the close link between death on the roads and deprivation. Every death or injury on the roads is a great blow for anybody, whatever their background. However, child pedestrians from the lowest socio-economic group are 21 times more likely to be killed in traffic accidents than those in the higher groups. That chilling fact is not known widely enough and does not arouse as much consternation and uproar as it should. The report also looks at road safety as part of a system. It does not prescribe one single measure for dealing with the issue; it considers the design of roads and vehicles, enforcement, training and attitudes. It is pleasing to note that the Government are also starting to adopt that systems approach, in which it is recognised that there are many aspects to consider in addressing the critical issue of road safety and that a lot of different Departments need to be involved. The Committee was extremely concerned about the lack of reliability in the data on road injuries, particularly those in relation to serious injuries. Deaths on the roads declined by 18 per cent. during the period that we were considering; serious injuries declined by twice as much. We questioned the accuracy of the recording of serious injuries on the road, and specifically that of the STATS19 system. We were disappointed that although the Government's response acknowledged that there might be a problem, they did not propose any steps that we thought would deal with it. I am thinking particularly of the discrepancies between some of the reporting of serious accidents and data received by hospitals. We want the Government to do more on that issue, as we are not satisfied that the information that we are getting is accurate. The Committee was particularly concerned about the increase in deaths among certain groups of people. Although the overall number of casualties is coming down, there are areas of great concern; there has been, for example, an increase in deaths among motorcyclists and there is the situation in rural areas. The Committee focused on an aspect that it has considered before: that of novice drivers—young, male novice drivers in particular. Some 27 per cent. of 17 to 19-year-old male drivers have accidents during their first year of driving. One in every eight licence holders is under 25, yet one in three who die in collisions on the roads is in that age bracket.