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

15 MARCH 2006

  Q260  Mrs Ellman: At a previous session of this Committee we had evidence from the police who said that they did not have a great deal of representation locally about traffic enforcement and local road safety issues. Does that fit with your experience?

  Mr Salmon: I would say no. I would say the public call continually for a combination of more enforcement and more intervention.

  Mr Sherborne: I think it can be true but I think we want to do everything we can to encourage the police to take more active partnership and one of the changes to the regulations for safety cameras that is going to come in from 2007-08 incorporates the funding of safety cameras into the local transport plan, and hopefully this will encourage the local police forces to take much more part of the local transport plan, which I do not think they do so as effectively as they can at the moment.

  Q261  Chairman: Mr Lines, are your problems with the Met different?

  Mr Lines: No, we are very fortunate in London, Madam Chairman. The Mayor published a road safety strategy document and in it are clearly laid out targets for us to meet and ways of operating, which included partnering. The police are very much part of the pan-London Road Safety Forum which works very well with the boroughs, the police and other forces. We have a very good relationship, understanding and sharing of information.

  Q262  Mrs Ellman: What about general police support for local road safety initiatives outside of London? Have you any comment on that?

  Mr Thornton: Could I quickly go back to the previous one. In Bradford we have had neighbourhood forums operating in the district for some 12 years now and local people can ask to see council officials to talk about council policy, council practice, and their concerns. They have three meetings a year and this has been going on for 12 years. Two of the biggest concerns for local people are traffic speed and traffic volumes.

  Q263  Chairman: That is helpful. Mr Salmon, on this?

  Mr Salmon: On your question about police support, we have been fairly fortunate in the whole of Sussex to have a positive police engagement in the development of joint strategies for broader speed management, so in developing our approach to road safety, with speed management as a key part of that activity, the police have been engaged continually, particularly for the last five years but broadly in the last 10 years, in an active way, and that means that we generally have an approach, both through the road death investigation side of things where we jointly investigate from a casualty savings perspective and also through the formulation of route strategies for road safety.

  Chairman: I am going to move on if I may. I think we have got the clear view of all of you. Mrs Ellman?

  Q264  Mrs Ellman: Transport for London, in your written evidence you say that a lack of roads policing has led to increased `hit and run' collisions. Could you tell us some more about that?

  Mr Lines: To our mind the two things have gone together. It is hard to say what causes more hit and runs, to be honest, there are lots of factors in there but from the point of view of trying to treat them I think the roads policing is a very important element and one of the ways that we would see to get at the cause. What I guess I am really saying is that we would like more roads policing, particularly for our hit and run problem. In some of our boroughs now nearly a quarter of our serious and fatal casualties are hit and run collisions, and it is getting quite epidemic.

  Q265  Mrs Ellman: Would you say the balance is right between technology-led and officer-led enforcement?

  Mr Lines: I do not see it as a balance. I think if you are determined to reduce casualties then both of them work together. I do not think there is a balancing of the scales. I think you want more of both.

  Q266  Chairman: More of both. That is dancing on a pin a little tiny bit. Mr Thornton?

  Mr Thornton: I think we need to look carefully at where we use technology. We have been using ANPR equipment in West Yorkshire but to my mind not dealing with major issues of road safety; it has been dealing with criminality.

  Mr Salmon: I think we need to develop a balance on the use of technology for influencing the driver or the road user, the vehicle and the road environment, and I think what we have to determine is when technology is assisting road safety and when it can actually be going against the benefits of road safety through distraction of the driver.

  Lt Col Pemberton: We are all talking about relying on someone—the driver—making a decision about whether he should or should not or she should or should not exceed the speed limit, and the DfT statistics are that 70% of all drivers at some time are, but there is a piece of technology which is on the table now being worked on which will make the decision, not the driver, and that passing a given point it will govern the speed of the car, and if that given point is the start of the speed limit restricted zone then that is what will happen in the future. It will take political will to bring that in.

  Q267  Mrs Ellman: Has decriminalising some driving offences been a positive step?

  Mr Burton: I think it has. It allows the police to concentrate on some of the higher level criminality issues. It allows the local transport agency to deal with some of these issues quite effectively. The most important thing that we have found in London—and it goes back to the technology and human intervention issue—is that you need to be sure that they are integrated together because the decriminalised issues are important to us but you need to integrate that with the police activities as well.

  Q268  Mrs Ellman: And the Roads Policing Strategy has a focus on `denying criminals the use of the road. Is that going to take attention away from safety issues?

  Mr Sherborne: One of the first things is that people who disobey the laws of the road are criminals so they are linked so therefore it can be part of the same strategy and it is part of our job to remind the police of that, I think.

  Q269  Chairman: Mr Salmon?

  Mr Salmon: The same point.

  Mr Thornton: For me it was disappointing that the joint strategy is about roads policing really and it is not more community-focused and it does not put in a lot of the transport and health benefits that can come from working together to make safer roads.

  Mr Burton: We believe very strongly that if you deal with the low level issues, you pick up and catch a lot of the higher level criminality issues, so I do not think you can split them apart.

  Q270  Mrs Ellman: Do you see any division emerging between the police concerned with automatic number plate recognition looking for criminals and local authorities looking at traffic enforcement? Do you see it in that way?

  Mr Sherborne: It is a general thing, if I might make the point that local authorities and the police should work together closely on everything.

  Q271  Mrs Ellman: Do they though?

  Mr Sherborne: And that both sides try and do their best. Obviously co-operation could always be improved but we should continually work to look at how we can help each other.

  Q272  Mr Donaldson: How do you expect the new funding arrangements to affect the work of the safety camera partnerships?

  Lt Col Pemberton: As part of the four Es I was talking about, I would see that would help more in education. We have been using a piece of equipment called a speed indicator device which is not enforcement, it is part of education. The funding was pulled on that for a period and therefore if we use it now we have to charge the local parish councils, and some of them are not terribly well off. It will give us more flexibility to mix and match our education or enforcement.

  Mr Thornton: The safety camera partnership is fully integrated in West Yorkshire and has been since its inception in 2002. I think the opportunities of the new funding are in terms of publicity to give people more information about what we are doing and get support for what we are doing but also to progress initiatives that involve local people and change behaviour.

  Mr Lines: There are some good things about the new funding arrangements that we think are very positive. What worries our particular London Safety Camera Partnership is the fact that it is all more or less ring-fenced now in terms of the budgets. In London we are unique in having 300 sites still outstanding which exceed the criteria, which I do not think is usual in partnerships. There is a lot of potential for doing more in London and we see these funding arrangements as potentially constraining.

  Q273  Mr Donaldson: Therefore do you believe that the new funding arrangements will actually reduce the number of cameras that are likely to be in operation?

  Mr Lines: Reduce it as opposed to what the long-term plan was, probably not, but if your aspiration is to have increases then yes.

  Q274  Mr Donaldson: It minimises the potential for increases?

  Mr Lines: Yes.

  Q275  Mr Donaldson: Does that apply in other areas, do you think?

  Mr Salmon: We would see a slower growth. Frankly, that is driven primarily by the circumstances, in that we are looking at high casualty sites irrespective of any national guidance and the number of high casualty sites will obviously be slower in coming forward having dealt with the predominant number. The other point I would make about the benefit is the removal of the linkage between expenditure and fine income because that has been perceived nationally as a very negative aspect of the safety camera programme. I think the local focus during through the transport plans will change that perception.

  Mr Thornton: In West Yorkshire I think the problems with the new funding arrangements are that the indicative allocation for road safety in West Yorkshire does not meet the expenses of the camera partnership, so we are going to have to tighten what we do to stay within those guidelines and it will prevent us expanding cameras to areas that do need it.

  Mr Sherborne: If I could just reiterate the point I made earlier. I think the new guidelines and the new way of working will bring the police more closely to work with local authorities, which I think is a good thing. It will also be interesting to see how the local transport plan itself is amended by this quite large new addition in the fact that at the moment the funding in the local transport plans is nearly all for capital expenditure, on engineering schemes and the like, whereas the camera funding is very much revenue for staff, and it would be interesting to see how the wording of the new funding arrangements allows the local transport plan itself to spend more on education, publicity and staffing issues.

  Q276  Mr Donaldson: Yet the police have expressed concerns that police forces will lose out now that the funding goes direct to local authorities. I take it that you would dispute that?

  Mr Sherborne: Hopefully yes. Time will tell. But I think they will have to join in with local authorities and make their case rather than being isolated, if you like, by choice, and I can only see that as a good thing.

  Mr Salmon: I am sure my Cabinet Member can comment on the local partnership strength, but with regard to the regional position I also chair a regional road safety group, and at a recent meeting on this topic there was some considerable concern that partnerships would not necessarily stay as strong if the flexibilities for funding created a different attitude at a local political level, so there is certainly some disquiet out there. However, it is very varied. There are strong partnerships and there are concerns about partnerships not being so strong.

  Lt Col Pemberton: Could I add from a partnership point of view that it will vary and there is that risk that you infer, but with a strong partnership, as I think we have got in Sussex, that is not a danger at all; it will stay as it is. What would concern me is if by moving it into the local transport plan the present funding stream were to disappear. That would concern me.

  Q277  Mr Donaldson: Through the camera partnerships local authorities have become involved in traffic law enforcement. Are there other types of traffic offences you would welcome the opportunity to become more involved in?

  Mr Salmon: Can I say that we were involved before the formal camera partnerships in the sense of working with the police anyway. We have not really seen any difference, only that it has been able to expand and become more co-ordinated and more centrally run. So in that sense we achieve better value for money and certainly much bigger casualty reduction benefits. As far as other areas are concerned, we already have local authority parking enforcement being introduced and I think we see other benefits in terms of better network management, primarily in order to get the streets balanced in terms of local use and in a sense potentially adding to road safety benefits.

  Lt Col Pemberton: And releasing police resources when you introduce it to do other things. That was the point I wanted to make.

  Q278  Mr Donaldson: Can I ask Mr Thornton, have you been able to use camera technology to detect mobile phone and seat belt offences in Bradford? If so, how successful has it been?

  Mr Thornton: I am not aware that we are doing that, although I do know that we have CCTV cameras on traffic signal installations so—

  Q279  Chairman: Our source is the Bradford Evening Argus; how much weight do you put on that?

  Mr Thornton: Actually they have given us an awful lot of good publicity for the casualty reduction savings.

  Chairman: But are they likely to be right or wrong?