House of Commons Hansard Debates for 16 Nov 1990

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causes of the accident and prepares a report, who learns from that type of accident? Is it just dismissed as one of those things that happen and is likely to happen again?

We could learn many lessons from the recent M42 accident if only someone took the time and the trouble to analyse what happened. My hon. Friends the Members for Bromsgrove and for Meriden have already described the location of the accident. It took place on a very busy part of the motorway system where the M42 crosses underneath, by means of a flyover-slip road arrangement, the extremely busy A45 Birmingham to Coventry road that connects with Birmingham's national exhibition centre, the international airport and the international railway station. Those are all areas that experience dramatic increases in passenger throughput, which are further increased by showgoers. Everyone knows that when the national exhibition centre is busy there are problems at that junction.

On Tuesday 6 November, there were six exhibitions at the NEC. The weather was fine--there was no question of there being any fog or bad weather--and when the accident occurred, at 11.45 am, conditions were almost ideal.

Tailbacks were assumed to be expected. Comments after the accident, which were well reported in all the newspapers, made it clear that traffic had been monitored by the police earlier that morning and that there were no problems. However, it gradually emerged from other comments that there had been a major problem at the junction earlier in the morning.

Passing motorists reported that traffic was especially confused. A temporary marker board indicated to traffic travelling in a northerly direction that one of the lanes of the slip road at the junction had been closed off. There were no warning lights, but drivers anxious to join the slip road were obviously hesitant about which lane to take. The hard shoulder just before the junction was coned off as work was taking place, but both lanes on the slip road were open. Traffic had formed a single lane by the road works. Drivers then had to move out of that lane to the other lane. We must remember that the roundabout at the junction was controlled by traffic lights and that, by the time of the accident, the tailback stretched back on to the motorway.

A heavy goods vehicle ran into the traffic. It may have been travelling too fast or have been driven erratically--we must wait to see what action the police take with regard to the drivers involved. Speed is always a factor in accidents. If there is an impact, speed is part of the problem but it is not the whole problem. Comments made after the accident were interesting. An officer was reported in a newspaper as saying :

"Officers monitored the junction earlier because six NEC shows were being held. When checked there were no tailbacks and so warning lights on the motorway were not switched on."

There was no indication of when the motorway had been checked. Chief Superintendent Tony Warren said :

"Warning lights were operating at the approach to the NEC on the opposite"- -

the southbound--

"carriageway, but we had no reports of any tailbacks on the northbound section."

Chief Inspector John Hayward of the central motorway traffic unit commented :

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"It came down to motorists not driving at the speed at which they could brake safely"--

a fairly reasonable comment.

Meanwhile, Mike Stevens, a member of the public who was involved in the accident but managed to walk away unharmed--a resident of Barston--stated that after the accident the police said, "We've told them again and again that this sort of accident would happen." Of course, speed is a factor, but many other questions are left unanswered, and an inquest would be hard put to probe all the questions that need to be answered. I do not think that we could expect a satisfactory outcome.

I make no allegations about what I think happened because I do not know. Inded, it is because I do not know that I am anxious to find out. I have received a wide divergence of opinion since I expressed my concern that this motorway accident would be labelled as another accident which was due to motorists' failure to anticipate traffic conditions which should have been abundantly obvious to them, that therefore nothing further would happen, that the accident would be dismissed as a tragedy and that it was almost to be expected. There are questions and evidence that should be considered much more carefully.

At 11.15 am, half an hour before the accident, Joy Morgan, my constituent, was travelling with her husband on their way to Leicester. They experienced, in her words, "confused traffic", "confused signposting", "but no warning". She expressed grave concern about the confusion caused by coning off the hard shoulder and motorists' expectation that the slip road was at least restricted, causing traffic to mill about. No warning sign was shown on the motorway. Mrs. Morgan telephoned the police that evening to give them her evidence, but apparently they were not particularly interested. We can establish that at 11.15 am the tailback on to the motorway at the northbound junction was substantial. Tailbacks do not just happen--they take a while to build up. I submit that that junction was experiencing problems nearly 50 minutes before the accident--50 minutes in which, knowing of the exhibitions and knowing the pressures on that junction, the motorway police had obviously not given that road any attention, as the signs had not been lit up to warn traffic.

I can do not better than repeat the words of a letter by Mr. R. J. Hughes of Solihull. I cannot comment on his integrity, but people do not normally write letters if they do not stand by their evidence. Mr. Hughes began :

"Further to your articles in Evening Mail of Wednesday 7th November",

which described the accident. He continued :

"My purpose in writing is to set out the situation as I saw it at around 10am sometime before the event--one-and-three-quarter hours before the accident."

Mr. Hughes continued :

"I have not written to the Police as no doubt my comments of what I saw some 2 hours before the accident would be considered irrelevant.

I confirm the statements of the driver who passed the scene moments' before the crash re confusion created by a sign a mile before the junction indicating that only one lane of the slip road was open and also his comments re the queue and the fact that drivers were pulling out into the second lane (this was also true at 10am). I feel the police comment on Page 3 that we had no reports of any tailbacks on the northbound section' is hard to believe.

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At 10am tailbacks were building up on both carriageways and were already a danger and causing confusion. I confirm that I saw a police car and police on the bridge over the Motorway and a police Range Rover on the hard shoulder of the opposite carriageway.

Whilst not condoning or accusing the irresponsibility of so many drivers today, it appeared to me some considerable time before the event, that such a result was inevitable and for experienced traffic police who appeared to have a considerable presence on the scene so long before not to have taken action to minimise the dangers is difficult to understand and in view of the deaths so hard to accept."

At the coroner's inquest earlier this week, Chief Inspector John Hayward of the central motorway police, said :

"I firmly believe that if the tailback had been monitored then a signal could have been exhibited."

According to eye-witness accounts, the tailback was monitored by the police, so why were the lights not triggered at 10 o'clock at least, well before the accident? Can an inquest sort out this confusion? Is an inquest into such a grave issue capable of seeking and calling witnesses to establish what went wrong? There may be sensible and reasonable answers to these questions. The writer of that letter may have been confused and may not have fully appreciated what the police were looking at, if they were there, or what conclusions they reached. I have visited that roundabout and seen for myself that, from the place where the police were reported to be, they could adequately have seen the junction and the traffic build-up without having to move.

There are many questions about the accident and I believe that we owe those who died, those who were injured and all the members of the travelling public answers to them. It is not enough to conduct inquiries in the traumatic atmosphere of a coroner's court. Inquiries need to be conducted by experts who can call witnesses, as is the case with rail and air disasters, so that we can find out what happened. We could then learn from such accidents and not merely dismiss them into the hands of insurance companies which will fight about who was responsible.

We must ask ourselves for example, if the police were saying to somebody, "We've told them that junction's no good", whom they were telling and why no action was taken. We knew that the junction was no good in its construction and in its monitoring by electronic instruments, as my hon. Friend the Member for Meriden has already pointed out. Why were no cameras installed at the junction? For years, the dangers of the junction have been known. I have experienced the danger of having to queue on the motorway to get on to the junction. I and my hon. Friends the Members for Bromsgrove and for Meriden went to see my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State earlier this week on another matter. We asked him whether priority could be given to installing cameras at the junction immediately--not in six months' time--to avoid any repetition of such an accident at a known danger spot.

We need to establish the speed and conduct of heavy goods vehicles on the approach to the junction and whether they would have benefited from speed limiters. These questions will be examined by the police, but they should also be examined in a public court of inquiry. We need to consider the crash barriers, especially those at the side of the motorway. From the photographs, it seems that cars caught between the heavy goods vehicle and the crash barriers received enormous pressure which may have been

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a contributory factor to the injuries received. Are the barriers too strong for the work that they are supposed to do?

It is not sufficient to dismiss such major accidents as an act of God and it is not enough to say that with about 80 million individual road journeys each day, there are bound to be accidents. It is true that independently driven vehicles are likely to collide, but we shall never develop a better and safer system unless we learn publicly from mistakes. All too often, we never hear of the causes of such accidents. It is high time to pull away the cloud of controversy and to analyse the accident moment by moment. I am not making allegations about what went wrong. Ultimately, the accident was caused by bad driving, but that was not the only factor. For many years, other things had gone wrong at that junction, although those faults may have been compounded by individual mistakes. We owe it to those who died to try to find out what those mistakes were. 1.17 pm

Mr. Peter L. Pike (Burnley) : Our debate today is on an extremely important subject. I have listened to the Minister in many debates but I never thought that I could listen to him speaking for as long as he has today--I do not criticise him for it--without disagreeing violently with almost everything that he said. Normally, he could not speak for two minutes without my disagreeing strongly with his argument. It was very different this morning. I agreed with almost everything that he said, which was a welcome change.

I am no newcomer to the subject and I can claim a long pedigree in having raised issues of road safety. When I first stood for the local council in 1960, the local press dubbed me a campaigner for greater road safety and especially for greater pedestrian safety. At that time, I argued that the then Ministry of Transport seemed to be concerned mainly about the movement of traffic and that pedestrians came far lower down the scale. I argued that more emphasis might be placed on pedestrian safety if we had a Minister responsible for it. We have come a long way since then but, in considering pedestrians, we must always remember that all of us--whether motorists, cyclists or motorcyclists--are pedestrians at times, so we all have a vested interest in pedestrian safety.

I wish to refer to two points made by my hon. Friend the Member for Tooting (Mr. Cox). As he said, parking on pavements causes great difficulties to pedestrians and we need to do something about it. Linked with that is the question of parking at corners and at junctions, which makes access difficult and means that other drivers have to swing their cars cars further out into the road, manoeuvring with difficulty, to turn the corner or cross the junction. Moreover, most pedestrians cross at or near junctions and it is extremely difficult for them to do so if a car is parked there. We must work to improve matters in that respect.

My hon. Friend the Member for Tooting also referred to pedestrian crossings in his area. I have had similar difficulties in making the case for crossings in my constituency. We all accept that we must have a reasonable number of pedestrian crossings : we cannot place crossings at 100-yard intervals because that will defeat the object and cause more problems than it solves. But the criteria for determining the approval of crossings are wholly unrealistic. We must examine local circumstances more

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closely in determining whether approval should be granted, as well as continuing to take into account traffic flows and patterns and national figures. There may only be a problem at certain times of day but at those times the lack of a crossing is not just a problem for people wishing to cross the road but a road safety problem. I am not saying that we should allow masses of pedestrian crossings, but we should examine local circumstances more realistically in determining whether they are needed and whether they will be in the interests of safety. If we decide that they are, we should allow them to be provided.

The hon. Member for Birmingham, Northfield (Mr. King) referred to hazard signs--the flashing or standing signs on the motorways. I referred to that subject last Friday during our debate on the Gracious Speech and I have raised it on numerous occasions. As I have said repeatedly, we must ensure not only that we have more and better illuminated signs and hazard warning systems on all our major motorways and trunk roads but that they give the correct information. If they do not, they will be disregarded, and that will be more of a problem than if we had not put them there in the first place. I drive on motorways every week. I have to go to Herefordshire this afternoon and on to Burnley in the middle of the night and I know that I am bound to see signs giving speed limits where there is in fact no problem at all. No doubt I will then reach a sign giving the all-clear and saying that the speed limit is back up to 70 mph and, within 100 yards or so, I shall have to brake solidly because traffic on the carriageway ahead will be at a standstill. That does not occur on odd occasions, it happens week after week. It occurs all over the country. Until we get this right, we shall have problems. This problem is serious, and everyone who drives on our motorways and major roads will be aware of it.

Sometimes the sign states that the nearside lane is closed, but when the hazard is reached one discovers that a different lane has been closed. Traffic has changed lane in preparation for the hazard as described on the sign but then has to change again suddenly when the reality becomes clear. I could give many other examples, but the point is already clear. The Minister understands that it is crucial that we correct that problem. In passing, I must state that the problem varies slightly in different parts of the country. I remember driving along the M65 in my constituency when a caravan became detached on the opposite carriageway and crashed into the central barrier. I stopped on the hard shoulder and used the emergency telephone. Before I got back into my car, the signs were flashing on the other carriageway indicating that there was a problem. The Minister and his predecessor will be aware that I have had correspondence with them about directional signs. They made one or two concessions, but the standard of signposting in this country still needs to be improved. If people leave a main road and approach a junction or a roundabout, they frequently find that the place names that they have been following for some distance are no longer mentioned. That not only causes problems for people in terms of reaching their destination, it also creates a traffic hazard because the motorist hesitates, not knowing whether to go left, right or straight ahead. Signposting of that kind is all very well if people know precisely where they are going, but if people are in doubt such signs are not helpful.

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So many signs are poorly painted and maintained. Frequently the lights do not work and the signs are not illuminated not just for the odd day but for weeks on end. There is an extremely poor standard of signposting on motorways and other roads. The same applies to local directional signs and through routes. I drive round the Blackburn ring road on my way home and I have noticed that one half of a sign has disappeared and the other half is so faint that it cannot be read. Another sign which used to give distances has completely disappeared. That problem exists throughout the country and it adds to safety hazards. I raise it as a safety issue because hesitancy and doubt in a driver's mind cause confusion as the driver has to think where he is going when he should be paying closer attention to traffic conditions.

I strongly agree with the Minister about speed limits. Heavy vehicles on motorways tend to get right on the tail of the car in front. They almost touch the bumper. A driver might be travelling at 70 mph, but the heavy goods vehicle behind will flash its lights and force a way through. That is extremely dangerous. When a maximum speed is signed, people are not necessarily expected to travel at that speed. The real speed limit depends on safety, road and weather conditions and other factors. If those conditions require people to drive at a speed lower than the signed limit, that is the speed at which people should be driving.

The Minister also referred to speeding in rural areas, where there is a theoretical 60 mph limit on many roads. There may be bends and turns on those roads, but the people who know them hurtle along in the centre of the road at 60 mph in the belief that if the limit is 60 mph they ought to drive at that speed, whether or not it is safe to do so. We must ensure that people drive at safe speeds. That should be the criterion for determining the speed at which we drive. Road spray is an extremely hazardous problem on motorways in poor weather conditions. We need an improvement in vehicle flaps. I shall not pursue that point as it has been covered on many occasions in the past, but sometimes when one has to pass vehicles there is a period when one cannot see anything at all ahead. One has no idea whether there is stationary traffic ahead--one just has to take the gamble, albeit momentarily. That is extremely dangerous. In a country with a climate such as ours, when there are wide expanses of concrete, asphalt and tarmac and a lack of drainage, we are bound to get spray. I appreciate that putting drains alongside motorways would cause major problems and that there would be safety problems. I do not pretend to know the answer, but we must accept that weather conditions mean that there will be more water lying on our motorways than on those in countries where it does not rain so frequently. Therefore, road spray will be a bigger problem here.

We must bear in mind the width of some motorways now. Most have four lanes, and there may be five or six lanes if we include the hard shoulder. That is an extremely large area, and when it rains heavily water cannot escape other than to the edge of the motorway. Sometimes that is not sufficient. Those issues are extremely important. I hope that what the Minister said is correct. I am glad that motor manufacturers are announcing that safety is an increasingly important factor which motorists take into account when they purchase a vehicle. When members of

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the Select Committee were at the Ford premises last year, we were told that people looking at expensive cars want better stereo systems and so on rather than anti-lock braking systems and other things that would improve safety. Obviously, I hope that motorists will start to demand safer and better vehicles, but if there is not to be a consumer-led demand, we as parliamentarians and the Minister as a representative of the Government have a responsibility to do everything possible to ensure that we force motor manufacturers to introduce sensible safety improvements in the concept and design of cars whenever possible.

I shall not repeat many of the other subjects that have been touched on, but they are important matters. I hope not only that we shall achieve the target of a one third reduction in casualty rates by the year 2000 but that we shall surpass that target before then. We have a responsibility to the nation to achieve safety standards on our roads as soon as possible.

1.34 pm

Mr. Anthony Steen (South Hams) : Having served for about 130 hours with the hon. Member for Burnley (Mr. Pike) on the Standing Committee which considered the bus legislation, I know that his interest in transport and transport matters was well known to the Committee and is becoming well known to the House. Just as he agreed with nearly everything that the Minister said, I agree with nearly everything that the hon. Gentleman said. A consensus is obviously developing in this debate.

The hon. Member for Burnley also mentioned rural matters. As most of the hon. Members who have participated in the debate represent primarily urban or suburban constituencies, I hope that the House would now like to hear from a Member representing a rural constituency. The trouble with rural England is that we have winding roads--that is the beauty of Britain. My constituency is in south Devon, where the county planners have assumed that if all the winding roads are straightened they will be made much safer. Tremendous mistakes are being made all over the country as planners and local politicians spend a lot of public money straightening our winding roads. Britain's countryside is beginning to change as the winding roads, which are part of the beauty of rural England, become straighter. It is as if we want to return to Roman times and to build narrow straight roads. I am totally opposed to that, because, far from making road travel safer, all the evidence suggests that straightening rural roads makes them more dangerous.

I should like to give an example of what has happened in a tiny village just outside Totnes, in Devon, called Berry Pomeroy. It has a very winding road, with hills that are 1:6. As the road was so narrow, drivers acted with great caution because they were not sure whether they could pass each other. Everything was going fine--children going to the local school could cross the road because it was so narrow and cars went slowly through the village. What happened? The planners got the brilliant idea that they should widen and straighten the road, and that is just what they did, with public money. They widened the road with community chargepayers' money. So what happens now? The traffic goes through the village at three times its previous speed. The primary school parents are now all up in arms and want what they call "traffic-calming measures"--some sort of tranquilisers for cars. They want

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cars to be slowed down by humps. Not only have we straightened the road, which means that all the cars now go faster and make it unsafe, but we now want to spend more public money installing traffic-calming measures so that the cars will slow down again. The Minister should take a grip of the situation before more and more county authorities want more and more public money for those two transport measures. In another part of my constituency, the so-called traffic-calming measures have been put on a fast road. What happens? The cars use the wrong side of the road so that they can avoid the humps because they are not comfortable to go over. That is not very clever either. Such terrible traffic-calming measures have been used at Paddington station that a car's suspension can be wrecked if one drives over them at more than 1 mph. I have tried to get over them, and even at 1 mph it cannot be done because one's car goes backwards and hits the car behind. All this is getting quite out of hand.

The whole business about safety and speed needs to be put into perspective. I hope that the Minister will stop county councils straightening rural England because it is more dangerous, expensive and leads to other expenses. In addtion, it leads to the destruction of the countryside. Whenever a road is widened in south Devon, the hedgerows are destroyed. On the one hand, the farmers are putting back the hedgerows with the help of Government grants, while, on the other hand, the county is taking the hedgerows away with other Government grants. I know that the Minister is not a magician, but he should be aware of the problem and of the fact that we are spending double the amount of community chargepayers' money on all these operations which are not making rural England better ; they are making it look worse and become more dangerous.

Hon. Members who have been here for a few years may know that, together with my hon. Friend the Member for Ealing, Acton (Sir G. Young), I started the House of Commons and House of Lords Cycling Club. We used to have a lot of pedalling Members of Parliament who would cycle around London. Because cycling in London has become so dangerous and so difficult, our membership has taken a dramatic downturn--although we have not lost any of our colleagues as a result of cycling.

A few weeks ago, I spent a couple of days cycling in Copenhagen, where it is totally safe. Everybody is cycling because the entire city has been designed for cyclists. The same is true of Holland. There is no reason why this should not be done in London. The problem in London is too many cars : it is as simple as that. We must reduce the number of cars, but we will not do so simply by having many more traffic wardens ; that just means more public expenditure. The way to reduce the number of cars is to have a good public transport system and a good taxi system which is not too expensive and to allow the possibility of cycling everywhere.

Cycling is not an accepted way of travelling in Britain. It seems slightly bizarre and eccentric. When I visit a Government Department other than the Department of Transport and try to park my bicycle, I am told to move it round the corner because it spoils the environmental beauty of the building. Cycling is not accepted as a bona fide way of travelling. When one goes to a club in Pall Mall and parks one's bicycle outside, one is asked to move it round the corner because club members would not like to see a cycle parked in front of the club.

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First, the Minister should make cycling far more acceptable. That means that it must be made less dangerous, and that can be done by handing pots of yellow paint to all the traffic wardens. Instead of sticking tickets on cars, all the traffic wardens should set out on Monday and paint a yellow line 5 ft or 6 ft from the edge of the main roads. That would be the cycling lane, and it would be perfectly feasible as long as cars were not allowed to park there. The trouble with our arterial routes is that everybody parks on them. Cycle lanes throughout the capital would not cost much, and cycling is a simple way to travel.

Secondly, we should consider whether to introduce legislation for helmets. Obviously, cycling is potentially dangerous, but only because of cars. I have never heard of a cyclist killing somebody, but people are killed by cars. The cyclist on his own is quite safe.

Sir Geoffrey Finsberg (Hampstead and Highgate) : Surely my hon. Friend must see in London every day cyclists going the wrong way in one way streets and going through traffic lights. If a motorist hits such a cyclist and kills him, the motorist will get the blame. Does my hon. Friend agree that cyclists should begin to obey the law rather than blatantly flouting it, as they often do each day?

Mr. Steen : I am always glad of interventions from my hon. Friend because they are always highly relevant. He is right. Cyclists flout the law almost as often as motorists. We have heard that motorists are parking on pavements and breaking tens of thousands of regulations. The problems relate to traffic volume and to the fact that cyclists become frustrated. I am a cyclist and I know that we cannot get through all the cars that are stopped in jams by the side of the kerb or just parked. Cyclists do things they should not do, and it is congestion that is causing the problem. I am suggesting a way to reduce that congestion so that cyclists can get about and will therefore become perfectly lawful. I am sure that car drivers will become lawful as well because, as I say, it is the volume of traffic that is causing the problem. Perhaps my hon. Friend the Member for Hampstead and Highgate (Sir G. Finsberg) and I could discuss this matter at a later date.

Because of the number of cars on the motorway, it took me eight and a half hours to drive to the west country last Friday. Today I have to go by plane, which will get me there much quicker. I apologise in advance to the Minister because I shall not be here for his reply. I hope that he will speak about the straightening of rural roads and about cycling.

1.43 pm

Mr. Peter Bottomley (Eltham) : People occasionally ask me why I have been so enthusiastic about reducing casualties, I should again like to share with the House the first paragraph of an article that Auberon Waugh wrote on 15 February 1986. I read it two weeks after I took on the job of Under-Secretary at the Department of Transport. The article was entitled :

"A Journey into the water that is under the Earth".

In that article Auberon Waugh wrote :

"Others have lost sisters before. Every day people lose husbands, wives, parents, children and friends they have loved whose loss reduces every perspective to dullness, misery and pain. In many cases they carry the pain around with them for the rest of their lives. At moments like this, one realises that under the surface of polite society there is a great well of sadness and bereavement, an aspect of the human condition

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which is as inescapable as it is seldom remarked, yet looming larger in many people's lives than any of the things they pretend to think important. The only excuse for allowing my own howl of anguish to be heard is to give those as yet unbereaved a glimps into the hellish blackness lying under the surface of their lives before they sensibly turn away and think of something else."

Auberon Waugh's sister, Margaret, was run over on a north London street. She was one of 1,700 pedestrians who were killed that year and every year on our roads. Mr. Waugh may be right in saying that he, his family and his friends had no interest in how or why it happened, but the rest of us do.

Those engaged in the reduction of road casualties include politicians, people at local authority level, who are responsible for looking after 96 per cent. of our roads, and many engineers and researchers, as well as a fair number of people in the media. I say to the media that covering the causes and consequences of road crashes is neither so easy that it is not worth doing nor so difficult that it cannot be done frequently.

On Monday, there was a statement on the Piper Alpha disaster. Those who lost their lives in that disaster amounted to the same number who die every 10 weeks in drink-related road crashes alone. What happens when there is a rail crash in which six people are killed? It should be remembered that 14 people died yesterday on our roads and not one of them seems to have been mentioned in the national press. I welcome the chance to participate once a year in a debate of this sort which is not tied specifically to one piece of proposed legislation, but we should be asking more than once a year why our national newspapers or motoring magazines are not represented in the House today and on other occasions.

People may want to ask why "Today", TV-am and all the other programmes that help to set a national agenda were not telephoning people yesterday to say, "Will you appear on our radio programme this morning or on television this evening?" I have been telephoned by representatives of the media on several occasions during the past week. Not one of the calls had anything to do with the killing of 14 people each day on our roads, 5,300 a year. They were all to do with the prospects of the leadership of a political party.

Mr. Alex Carlile : The hon. Gentleman told them that he wanted to propose his wife for leader.

Mr. Bottomley : I must not be distracted.

If we want to continue the reduction in the rate at which we kill or injure one another on the roads, we shall not do it primarily by legislation, or by exhortation. We shall do it by changes in our roads, in our vehicles and in how we behave.

How we behave depends on our understanding and our attitude. It depends also on the information that we receive. That information comes through broadcasts and the printed word in newspapers and magazines.

Some of the most influential broadcasters are people such as Derek Jameson, who was talking this morning on Radio 2 about the importance of children wearing seat belts in the back of cars. We could have reports of road crashes, in which passengers sitting in the backs of cars and

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not wearing seat belts are killed, on the basis that the incidents were potential offences under health and safety at work legislation. A major oil company lost a main board director and his wife when the car in which they were travelling was involved in a crash. The driver, who was obliged by law to wear a seat belt, survived. The passengers, who were sitting in the back, were killed. It will take some time for the regulations that my hon. Friend the Minister has proposed to take effect. Who could seriously regard himself to be fully suitable to be the director of a main company if he exposes himself and his wife unnecessarily to the doubled risk of injury or death in a crash by sitting in the back of a car without wearing a seat belt?

I no longer find myself so often being driven by members of the RUC in Northern Ireland or by members of the Government car service in Britain--I pay tribute to the regular drivers of both

organisations--but sometimes I find myself riding in limousines that have been provided by an outside body. I am fed up with finding the seat belt and buckle in the back underneath the seat on which I am resting. It is crazy that so many people who make their money by hiring cars, whether owned by the driver or a firm, remove the small instrument that can cut the risk in a crash by half.

On page 55 of "Road Accidents : Great Britain, The Casualty Report" there is a graph which should be in everyone's hands. It should be reproduced far more often. It relates the rate of casualties to the number of vehicles and the distance travelled.

There is no problem in reducing the rate of injury related to distance travelled by 30 per cent. by the year 2000. We are already a long way towards that goal.

The problem is that, with prosperity, more and more people have cars. Soon we may have the same number of cars per head as there are in Spain. It will take us many years to have as many cars per head as there are in France, Germany, Australia or the United States. I hope that the hon. Member for Lewisham, Deptford (Ms. Ruddock) will forgive me if I say in passing--I do not want to introduce partisanship into this--that developing and improving public transport is no substitute for dealing with roads. It is not.

Plenty of people are not yet sufficiently well off to have a car, let alone past that stage and so well off that they can do without a car. We must face the consequences of extra cars and extra distance travelled.

The target of reducing the number of casualties, which is different from the rate, by one third, will not be met for slight injuries. From now on, we should do what perhaps others and I should have done to begin with, which is to set a target for reducing the number of those who are killed and seriously injured because it is the consequences of those crashes which matter most to people. We cannot know the names that will be on the gravestones or written in books of remembrance, but we do know the people who will be in that category.

There will be 600 motor cyclists. Motor cyclists are perhaps 20 times more likely to be killed in a motor accident if they are under 20 as if they are over 25. The crucial problem is with young, inexperienced motor cyclists.

There will be 300 dead cyclists. As we have heard, 80 per cent. of them will die as a result of a collision with

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another vehicle or with a lamp post, or because the front mud guard falls onto the wheel, having the effect of an emergency brake and sending the cyclist head over heels.

There will be 2,700 people in cars. About 800 of the deaths of people in vehicles will prove to be linked to drink. The driver will be above the legal limit which, as has already been established, is well above the safety limit.

The only safe limit for driving is nil--no alcohol. Those who say that they need one or two drinks before they drive are as dependent on alcohol as those who take five pints or three double whiskies. Several steps can be taken by people other than the Government, but there are steps that the Government should take. I fear that at a European level we are dealing with serious issues in an amateurish way. I occasionally fall out with my hon. Friend the Member for Meriden (Mr. Mills) about his tyre tread groove depth. I accept his advice on which is the groove and which is the tread. There was absolutely no evidence for the European requirement to increase our tread groove depths, but it was done because it sounded right. It is a mild extra expense to motorists and does not matter that much. It was not a battle worth fighting to the end of the line.

Nevertheless, it was the wrong approach by Europe. If Europe were asked how many lives would be saved by imposing that increase in tyre tread groove depths, the answer should have been none, because it does not add to safety.

The other European issue in which I became involved--it was the only one on which I promised to resign if I was unsuccessful--was the proposal to require those who drive minibuses to have passed a public service vehicle test. That failed the test of saving lives. If the effect had been to move people from being transported in minibuses to being transported in ordinary cars, the risk of injury would have increased. We had the information. It is always sad when those who ask Governments at European or national level to take action on the grounds that it would improve road safety are then exposed to the criticism that they have not found the evidence.

I am not saying that everything should be strictly logical--I am not that much of a Powellite--but the reason why Britain has the safest roads in the world is that we tend to try things out. If they work we extend their use ; if not, we move on to something else. That approach is not common in Europe, but it should be, because European co-operation, especially in vehicle design, is critical.

It is a European scandal that the consumer movement of Europe has not forced other European Governments to push as hard as our Government to get pedestrian-friendly vehicles. Most of the 1,700 pedestrians who will die in a crash will do so because they hit or are hit by a car. Some will die in crashes with motor cycles, bicycles or heavy goods vehicles, but most of them will die in a collision with cars. If a car hits a pedestrian at a speed of more than 20 or 30 mph, the pedestrian is not likely to survive, but most crashes do not occur at such a speed.

Ninety per cent. of motor cycle crashes occur at speeds of less than 40 mph and 75 per cent. at less than 30 mph. If I am hit by a car travelling at 15 mph I want the front of that car to be pedestrian-friendly--I want to have a chance to survive that collision. At the moment cyclists and pedestrians are less likely to survive such a crash.

I hope that the Consumers Association will start to raise the awareness of other European consumers. I pay tribute to Auto Express, which is the only motoring

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magazine that gives the time it takes for a car to stop at a certain speed, let alone how fast it takes to reach a certain speed. That magazine's European sisters should start to campaign for pedestrian-friendly vehicle design.

The front of vehicles should have a bit of give to provide the de- acceleration that makes it more likely that the pedestrian will survive. I hope that similar progress will be made on side impact protection. We have heard about Euro-sid, the European side-impact dummy, for long enough, but no requirements have been given to automobile engineers. They could do so much to build in the protection for people outside and inside vehicles when subject to a frontal impact. We already know what could be done as a result of clever engineering.

It is scandalous that there is no European standard requiring a steering wheel of a car to be face-friendly. If I am in a crash and I am held back by the safety strap, but my face comes forward, there are still too many cars, including new ones, whose steering wheels will cause me more facial injury than those designed to the standard developed at the Transport and Road Research Laboratory at Crowthorne. Those improvements could be made at no extra cost. Mr. Eguchi of Yamaha, who led the Japanese automobile manufacturers association, provided me with an extremely interesting tour of Japan when I met the four major Japanese motor cycle manufacturers. I am pleased to praise Mr. Eguchi and his other honourable colleagues for the work they have done in Japan to raise safety awareness among motor cyclists. As a result of my interest they started to extend to Britain the Japanese habit of putting safety information on advertisements designed to attract motor cyclists. I approved of that and I welcomed that initiative. The problem is that the size of print they now use is so small that it looks like a printer's blur rather than important information. That information cannot be communicated to people unless they have a microscope. I ask them to do it in a way that shows that they are proud of being interested in road safety rather than ashamed of it.

What Japanese manufacturers should be ashamed of--I apologise for saying this openly, but I have said it privately for many years and it is right to put it on record--is that although they are able to manufacture motor cars and motor bikes that are among the best in the world, they do not demonstrate--although they cannot claim that they do not have it--that they have the technical competence or the humanitarian interest to make available, at least as optional extras on motor bikes, particularly on those bikes that learner motor cyclists use up to the age of 20--years that are so critical--improved designs and then to manufacture what the Transport and Road Research Laboratory has already designed at Crowthorne.

The British approach--to see whether something works and, if it does not, to try again from a different angle--has been successful. We have designed impact guards to protect the legs of motor cyclists. If I were to buy a motor bike today, I could purchase anything I liked to go on it--all the kit that fills the pages of Motor Cycle News. However, if I bought any kind of Japanese motor bike, I could not purchase leg protectors for it.

When I went to Japan, I took with me the TRRL's leg protector, but the Japanese were modest about letting me have an exchange rate for the design of such a product. It was an unimpressive performence.

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