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Road Safety

I thank my hon. Friend for his observation. Yes, indeed, that was one of the reasons the Committee did not make a recommendation in relation to age, although we did so in relation to experience required to pass the test. We also found a close relationship between uninsured, unlicensed driving and accidents, which was another matter of great concern. I wish to refer to a few of our recommendations. We thought it very important to make it easier for local authorities to have 20 mph zones in areas where they thought that appropriate. We are pleased that the Government seem to support that and hope that that will be followed up with guidance and help with the financial aspects of designating those zones. We wanted to have a separate target for reducing deaths rather than deaths aligned with serious injury, and that too has been accepted. We wanted a road accident investigation board to be set up, in the same way as there are such boards for other modes of transport—rail, aviation and in the maritime sector. As I said earlier, the scale of carnage on our roads would not be tolerated or accepted on any other mode of transport. There should be a road accident investigation board to emphasise that point and to try to improve the situation. We also thought that there should be an independent road safety commission that would continually assess what was happening and make recommendations. We wanted to establish a British road safety survey to produce more accurate statistics and perhaps to measure changes in attitude to different aspects of driving. Although the Government agreed that more questions could be incorporated into existing surveys such as the national travel survey, they did not accept our recommendation. They accepted that there should be a commission of experts to look at driving, but it was not entirely clear how it would be designated or what remit it would have; that seemed to fall rather short of our proposal for an independent road safety commission. We emphasised that there should be strong cross-departmental working, involving the Department for Transport, fire and rescue services, the Home Office and education and health services. That approach is extremely important.