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12.25 pm
Mr. Peter Bottomley (Eltham): When the hon. Member for the Western Isles (Mr. Macdonald) re-reads his speech in 20 years time, he will find two major flaws in it. The first involves the statistical information about the Bill being unpopular. After the experiment 25 years ago, the information from the opinion polls showed that more people were in favour of continuing that experiment than of stopping it. To stand up and say what he did 25 years later, when the information in the House of Commons brief shows that the majority of people wanted it to continue, is to turn statistics on their head.
The second thing that I hope that the hon. Gentleman will notice is his use of the statistic that there will be a cut of, perhaps, 1 per cent. in the number of road deaths. I thought that the number of deaths on our roads is slightly under 3,500 a year, 1 per cent. of which is about 35. The estimate that most people are willing to accept is that we shall prevent about 110 deaths a year. That strikes me as being 3 per cent., not 1 per cent. The hon. Gentleman may have been talking about overall casualties, including the vast number of slight casualties. There may be some other figure, but my estimate is that the saving of 110 lives is about 3 per cent. of our annual road deaths.
Mr. Macdonald:
I am using the Transport Research Laboratory's figures. If the hon. Gentleman considers table 7, he will find that the figures for overall casualties, slight ones included, is 0.67 per cent., but that the figure for killed and seriously injured is 1.18 per cent.
Mr. Bottomley:
The figure that the hon. Gentleman later used for the number of lives was 110, which, I estimate, is around 3 per cent. of our road deaths.
According to the figures as first calculated, we might have saved more than 230 lives a year at the time of the experiment. Since then, however, as the hon. Gentleman has rightly said, we have made a significant improvement in reducing deaths on our roads. They are down to under 3,500. They may go up and down occasionally. I hope that the secular trend will continue downwards.
Let me take the average number of lives that would have been saved in the United Kingdom during the 25 years that we have not had the casualty-saving time arrangement, not as 230 or 110, but as 150 a year. That
means 3,750 fellow citizens in this country have died unnecessarily because the House of Commons has not taken those lives seriously.
Mr. Bottomley:
I will not give way now. I am making my own speech.
Across the nation, we rightly know about the child who, on a newspaper round, was crushed by a lorry. That is newsworthy. I am not arguing that this change of time would have saved her life, but the fact that she died in a road crash is national news. Think of that death multiplied 3,750 times since Reginald Maudling was Home Secretary, when he said that it seemed obvious that people who opposed the case felt more strongly than those who supported it.
I am in the House of Commons today to say that I believe that saving those 3,750 lives was a responsibility that the House of Commons should not have ducked. We pay attention when it is reported that there is an increase in the risk of thrombosis by the use of a contraceptive pill. That becomes national news, but we can let 3,750 people die unnecessarily in the past 25 years, partly because some people, such as the hon. Member for East Lothian (Mr. Home Robertson)--although this is not a party issue--say that he prefers to rely on common sense and experience rather than on the information that is there from the "Stats 19" report and from police services across the country.
If the Bill receives a Second Reading, I shall at once propose that the special procedure that would allow some of the information and disputes on casualties to be taken into account. Perhaps my hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth, West (Mr. Butterfill) would say whether he accepts that proposal.
Mr. Butterfill:
Many hon. Members have called for the Bill to be referred to a Special Standing Committee, and on that basis I would not oppose such a motion.
Mr. Bottomley:
The House should be grateful to my hon. Friend, not only for introducing the Bill and for his speech in which he gave some of the reasons why some people are opposed to the measure, but for his generosity in accepting that, if the Bill receives its Second Reading, the Special Standing Committee procedure can be used. As I say, that will allow casualty figures to be compared and discussed. It should be possible to get people from Strathclyde, from the Scottish Office and from the Transport Research Laboratory together. If that happens, we may discover that there is far less disagreement than appears in the debate.
I am glad that the Government decided not to privatise the Transport Research Laboratory, because we must be able to have confidence in its work. If a major problem arises between statisticians in the Scottish Office and the TLR, I suspect that what will become the national statistical organisation will get them together and sort it out. The reason for setting up the old Central Statistical Organisation was to make sure that Ministers, Parliament and the country had the benefit of agreed figures.
Casualties have been reduced because, in general, Government and Parliament have formulated policies that work. I regret that there is a growing trend of introducing measures, either for our own reasons or because of Europe, that do not necessarily work. The idea that a
heavy goods vehicle driver must be able to read without glasses even though he requires them is ludicrous. The case for a ban on coaches using the third lane of motorways is unsubstantiated by the facts. However, whether casualties will be reduced by the proposed time change is not seriously disputed.
The figures from the experiment some 25 years ago show that the gains in Scotland were at least as great as those in other parts of the United Kingdom. As my hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth, West said, there are many reasons for believing that they were better. I do not argue that conditions in the north of Scotland are the same as those in the central belt. The mass of Scotland's population is in the Strathclyde region, in the central belt. If the debate concerned only Scotland and was taking place there, and those of us from England, Wales and Northern Ireland were ignored, the debate should conclude that the change would be beneficial to Scotland and should be supported by its people.
My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Scotland is being politically quite clever, because by giving the impression that he is not yet convinced by the arguments, he allows the debate in Scotland to take place without the partisan "Let's all knock the Government" approach that might otherwise occur. I pay tribute to him for that. In view of that stance, I hope that people in Scotland will leave party politics to one side, will become involved in the argument, and will demonstrate to my right hon. Friend and the House the overwhelming view that the change would benefit Scotland as a whole. I cannot argue for every person in Scotland: only for Scotland as a whole.
When I last asked questions on this subject, I was told by the then Secretary of State for Scotland, probably the one who estimated that there would be a significant saving of lives in Scotland when the measure was adopted, that there was no law telling farmers in Scotland at what hour they should go into the milking parlour. He also confirmed that there is no law in Scotland saying at what time building contractors should have their staff or self-employed subcontractors on site. It is up to people to make their own arrangements.
I shall now switch from the issue of casualties to the interests of the elderly, about which my right hon. Friend the Member for Fareham (Sir P. Lloyd) spoke. In his constituency, the elderly make up about 17 per cent. of the population. My right hon. Friend the Member for Worthing (Sir T. Higgins), who is one of the sponsors of the Bill and to whom I referred in 1986 as one of the wise and honourable people in the House, has 35 per cent.-- twice as many--people who are retired in his constituency.
As has rightly been said, those elderly people, in my constituency and elsewhere, value the extra hours of daylight at the time that they want to use it. If we, as Members of Parliament, write off the interests of those pensioners and retired people who want to be active, but who draw back into their homes when it gets dark, we would be betraying them. In the same way, we would be betraying the active young who, after school, want to get involved in worthwhile activities outside their homes. There is much to be said for video games, television and other activities that people do at home, but there is even
more to be said for worthwhile activities such as the scouts, the Woodcraft Folk, athletics and other sports, and drama and music.
Mr. Peter Hain (Neath):
I do not want to challenge the good faith or sincerity of the hon. Member for Bournemouth, West (Mr. Butterfill) in this matter; nor should he challenge that of hon. Members who take a different view. This is not a black and white issue, but one which requires very fine judgments and careful analysis.
Some of my best friends in the House will vote for the Bill, but I am strongly opposed to it. That is partly because I worked for the Communication Workers Union as its head of research for some 14 years, when I studied the matter carefully. I say with pride, and no defensiveness, that that union continues to have a relationship with me through supporting my local constituency office, but if it did not, I would still take the same view on the Bill, because it involves wider issues.
The arguments that the hon. Member for Bournemouth, West and his supporters made in favour of the Bill are based on extraordinarily extravagant claims. The Bill is supposed to be a magical measure. It is argued that tourism would boom, trade would be boosted, leisure would be all-pervasive, and we would become a nation of evening golfers. Crime would, if not disappear, be reduced, and accidents would fall. With the exception of the issue of accidents, to which I shall return, those arguments are pure fantasy.
The idea that, if we changed the clocks by one hour, we would arrive at some kind of semi-utopia is nonsense. It is a product of lobbies with a phone, a fax and a fictionary. The arguments are extremely creative, to say the least. I have read that tourism would increase by
£1 billion a year as a result of changing the clock by one hour. That stretches all credulity.
Are we seriously being asked to believe that people would decide whether to come to Britain on holiday on the basis of whether the clocks were put forward or back one hour? Imagine the scene in Europe. Families all over Europe are looking at brochures to decide whether to come on holiday to Scotland, Wales or England. Is it seriously argued that family Schmidt in Germany, family Le Brun in France and family Gonzales in Spain will decide, as they look through their brochures, to come to Britain because we have moved the clocks forward an hour? It is pure nonsense. Families might decide to come to Britain if we managed to get rid of some rain, but not because of a change in the time. We can dispose of that argument quickly.
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