MR STEVE THORNTON, MR DAVE SHERBORNE, LT COL TEX PEMBERTON, MR ROB SALMON, MR STEVE BURTON AND MR CHRIS LINES

15 MARCH 2006

  Q245 Chairman: Good afternoon, gentlemen. I see we are all gentlemen. Can I ask you to identify yourselves for the record.

  Lt Col Pemberton: My name is Tex Pemberton. I am the Cabinet Member for Highways and Transport in West Sussex.

  Mr Salmon: Rob Salmon, I am the Assistant Head of Highways and Transport in West Sussex and Chairman of the Local Safety Camera Partnership's Steering Group.

  Mr Thornton: I am Steve Thornton and I am Chair of the West Yorkshire Road Safety Strategy Group. I also chair the West Yorkshire Safety Camera Partnership. I manage the Neighbourhood Road Safety Initiative in Bradford and for the last 12 months was Chair of the Yorkshire and the Humber Casualty Reduction Steering Group.

  Q246  Chairman: And your wife is about to divorce you! Mr Sherborne?

  Mr Sherborne: Dave Sherborne, I am the Casualty Reduction Manager for Leeds City Council and also the local authority member for the Standing Committee on Road Accident Statistics.

  Mr Lines: I am Chris Lines and I am Head of the London Road Safety Unit at Transport for London.

  Mr Burton: I am Steve Burton and I am Deputy Director of Transport Policing Enforcement at Transport for London.

  Q247  Chairman: Thank you very much. Am I to assume that no-one has anything they particularly want to say. Mr Lines?

  Mr Lines: Just as an introductory statement, Madam Chairman, to say that we are very pleased to be here and thank you for asking us for evidence. We are very keen on new technology. We believe it has a big part to play in terms of road safety. If I could just say something about the experiment that Lorna was talking about. That was an analysis of the link between policing and casualties, which we think is absolutely critical and because the result was as it was we are now moving ahead with a more quantitative trial whereby we will be looking at higher levels of policing on the streets and measuring a surrogate of speed as a surrogate of casualties. So I think it is very important that we find a link so that we have a real business case for more roads policing.

  Q248  Chairman: I think that interested us because you have sort of said that policing is in decline but then said there has been a significant cut in casualties, so that would rather eliminate a problem there?

  Mr Lines: The two things are not at all exclusive. Policing is only one of the methods of reducing casualties. You said yourself, and the Committee have said, about engineering and changing behaviours, so all those three together are what produce the casualty reduction. If some are doing more than others then you have to look at the balance between them. You can quite easily get casualty reductions from the other methods.

  Q249  Chairman: So what part do you think enforcement played in that success in reducing road casualties?

  Mr Lines: I have no idea about the quantitatives of it but it did contribute because we do have some roads policing.

  Q250  Chairman: And you are hoping to be able to get some more statistics from the study?

  Mr Lines: I am hoping to get some statistics which will encourage more roads policing because of the quantitative benefits.

  Q251  Chairman: All of you: has traffic policing been given the priority it deserves over the past five years?

  Lt Col Pemberton: Yes, I think it has. Could I also add that West Sussex County Council is the lead authority of the Sussex Safety Camera Partnership which is East and West Sussex, Brighton and Hove, it has got the Highways Agency and the Sussex Police, and the boundaries are co-terminous with the Sussex Police and Her Majesty's Court Service, and I chair that partnership group. Yes, I think that roads policing has been given a higher priority in the Sussex area, in West Sussex in particular. I have to be able to stand up on this question of perception of revenue raising or casualty reduction and say to my council and the people of West Sussex that they have my guarantee, as I approved the site selection and the site installation, that it is only for casualty reduction, and we have had some very significant success.

  Q252  Chairman: And are you being convincing. Forgive me for asking, I do not know if one is allowed to ask a Lieutenant Colonel if they are convincing. Are you getting it over, sir?

  Lt Col Pemberton: We have not had the problem that nationally the perception has been. According to our database, 75% of the people of West Sussex accept that it is casualty reduction because we make frequent communication with them and we are showing them the statistics, and then leaving them open to challenge of course.

  Q253  Chairman: On this, Mr Thornton?

  Mr Thornton: In my experience in West Yorkshire, certainly there has not been enough emphasis placed on roads policing. In fact, my view is that we stand or fall together in terms of reducing road injuries, but what has happened in terms of the management of the police has prevented the police from playing their full part in casualty reduction.

  Q254  Chairman: So really you think the local authorities are very reliant on the police forces for decisions like that?

  Mr Thornton: I think we work together and we work together with local people, and so far from what I have seen in the inquiry we have not looked at how local people can be involved in safer roads and how they can become involved in roads policing in particular.

  Q255  Chairman: So at the moment would you say local authorities had any role particularly in policing deployment?

  Mr Thornton: Certainly I think we do. We need to work together with the police to look at priorities for us jointly to move forward, certainly to identify trends in road injuries which are the major causes where they are happening, and to work together with local people as a partnership to reduce roads injuries.

  Mr Salmon: We have had about 10 years' worth of working with the police on trying to get a priority-based and a strategy-based approach. I think it is true that they have not given as much priority to general road traffic policing. You made a point earlier that this has perhaps been more recently recognised in a change of direction. What we are also finding is that although we are getting full support for the safety camera work, it is being increasingly civilianised, which in itself is not an operational issue but it does beg a question about police resources and how they are being balanced.

  Lt Col Pemberton: Every time I have approached the previous Chief Constable of West Sussex (there has just been a change) to pressure him to put more policing on the roads, his answer has been, "Yes, Tex, but where do I get them from? Take them off the burglary squad?" and of course it has always been a question of resources. I think there has probably been a reliance as we have rolled out more safety cameras—and you will notice that we are calling them safety cameras rather than speed cameras—because as we have rolled out more the police have probably thought this is a way of reducing the manpower on the policing on the roads.

  Mr Sherborne: Can I just second that. I think we ought to look more at the other issues that were touched on earlier in the session today in terms of dangerous driving, drink-driving and other tasks that cannot be done by the speed cameras, and I think we are losing the opportunity to tackle those as much as we ought to be able to.

  Q256  Mr Goodwill: A question for Mr Thornton, I am sure you have noticed that in North Yorkshire we have achieved good reductions in casualties (with the possible exception of motor cycle accidents) without using fixed speed cameras. How would you square that with this suggestion that it is cameras that are delivering the increased road safety?

  Mr Thornton: I have never made a suggestion that cameras on their own are delivering the reductions in road injuries. In Bradford, for example, we have some 86 different initiatives which are targeted towards reducing road injuries. I think we have cameras on 22 roads out of almost 10,000 roads in Bradford. They have an effect where they are placed and they are changing behaviour overall. In West Yorkshire we are seeing average speeds coming down and we are seeing fixed penalties coming down with the installation of cameras. We still need more cameras to cover the roads that meet Government guidelines for the provision of cameras where people have been killed or seriously injured. It was never my suggestion that cameras were the sole cause of the decline in casualties, they are not, there is an awful lot more in there. I think North Yorkshire has very different problems. You have a much bigger area with far more rural roads and I do not think you can compare the situation.

  Q257  Chairman: I think we all recognise that Yorkshire is a country of its own! Mr Pemberton?

  Lt Col Pemberton: I am from Yorkshire too!

  Q258  Chairman: They are everywhere!

  Lt Col Pemberton: We are not advocating that safety cameras in themselves would be the sole deterrent because we deal in what we call the four Es. I will put them in order of priority. The education of drivers comes first to us. Then we move into engineering on our roads if education is not working and not being successful. Then we come to enforcement and finally the fourth E is to evaluate all of that, so we work through the four Es. Can I say that I am carrying that message across to Europe and we are working closely with a European group on the same formula.

  Q259  Chairman: Very briefly, Mr Thornton, tell us something new.

  Mr Thornton: Hopefully it is. We are moving away from the four Es as a road safety model because they concentrate on what professional agencies and enforcement agencies can do rather than how local people can contribute to safety.