Examination of Witnesses (Question Numbers
106-119)
MR ROB
SALMON, MR
CHRIS LINES,
MR NEAL
SKELTON AND
MR PAUL
EVERITT
30 APRIL 2008
Mr Clelland: Good afternoon, everyone,
welcome to the Transport Select Committee. This is the first meeting
of the Committee since the sudden and tragic death of our Chairman,
Gwyneth Dunwoody. Gwyneth, as we all know, was a consummate politician.
She was very well respected on all sides of the House of Commons,
not least by this Committee, its members and its staff. She will
be sadly missed. She was also, of course, an expert at transport
issues and well-respected in the general transport world outside.
I hope you will join me and stand for a minute's silence in memory
of Gwyneth Dunwoody.
There followed a minute's silence.
Thank you. Before we start could I ask members
who have an interest to declare? Mr Martlew.
Mr Martlew: I am a member of Unite and
the GMB trade unions.
Graham Stringer: A member of Unite.
Clive Efford: A member of Unite.
Mrs Ellman: A member of Unite.
Q106 Mr Clelland: David Clelland,
a member of Unite. I am not the permanent Chairman of the Committee;
I am only here temporarily while the Committee sorts itself out
and elects a new chairman in due course after the funeral of Mrs
Dunwoody takes place. The witnesses should introduce themselves
for the record, please, from my left.
Mr Salmon: Thank you, Chairman.
Rob Salmon, I am here for the County Surveyors' Society and I
am the Assistant Head of Highways & Transport for West Sussex
County Council.
Mr Lines: I am Chris Lines, I
am here representing the Technical Advisers Group and I am Head
of Road Safety at Transport for London.
Mr Everitt: My name is Paul Everitt,
I am the Chief Executive of the Society of Motor Manufacturers
and Traders.
Mr Skelton: I am Neal Skelton,
I am Head of Professional Services for ITS UK, Intelligent Transportation
Systems.
Q107 Mr Clelland: Welcome, thank
you for coming to this first session of our inquiry into road
safety. Can I just ask initially what, in your view, is the main
role of government in relation to road safety?
Mr Salmon: I would say primarily
to set direction, to look at the overall strategy, certainly to
set targets but also to be aware of what joining up is needed
to tackle the combination of efforts needed for road safety and
to carry out research in that direction to give us an evidence-based
steer across the whole area of road safety work.
Mr Lines: I would like to add
funding, government has a major role to play in the solid funding
of road safety, and to say leadership as well. It is leadership
which is really important. Road safety, in my view, cannot be
delivered without the public and support from society and leadership
from government has a big role to play in affecting public opinions.
Q108 Mr Clelland: What role does
road safety have in relation to wider transport policy and other
social, environmental and economic policy objectives?
Mr Everitt: If I could touch on
a bit of both of those questions, from a vehicle manufacturer's
perspective clearly government is central in creating the regulatory
and legislative environment in which we put our products onto
the marketplace. Clearly there are a number of sometimes conflicting
requirements that society places on us in terms of what it requires
in terms of safety but also in terms of environmental performance
and what we look for from government is to provide us with the
right kind of lead and guidance on balancing those sometimes conflicting
requirements and ensuring that we have a clear direction so that
we are not in a position on one level where this Committee will
be scrutinising the industry rightly on its performance on road
safety and elsewhere we will be scrutinised on CO2 emissions or
other hazardous exhaust emissions. Clearly, sometimes there are
issues that need to be understood across those various performance
criteria so that we can provide satisfactory products into the
marketplace.
Mr Salmon: There is a very strong
link to health and I think the cost to society of road safety
obviously has a strong link to health in today's joined-up policy
thinking, and with road safety being part of transport/mobility
there is the point about accessibility to services too, but health
must be the single most important one.
Q109 Mr Clelland: What about other
government departments in terms of reducing casualties, apart
from the Department for Transport; what role do other government
departments have?
Mr Lines: One that springs to
mind is the Home Office in terms of roads policing, that is critical
to a holistic road safety policy and I agree with colleagues that
there is a lot more we can do with the health links as well.
Mr Skelton: I would like to support
colleagues and their comments; road safety does transcend across
more than only one government department. The Home Office has
a distinct responsibility within the roads policing area and it
is the joining-up of the two that has tended to ensure a coherent
strategy that actually helps to minimise casualties. On the estimation
that each road death costs approximately £1.5 million together
with the associated congestion it is this point, as my colleague
said before, of balancing the priorities of environment, transportation
and congestion as well as safety.
Q110 Mr Clelland: Are there sufficient
funds allocated to road safety? Are the funds which are available
being used effectively enough?
Mr Salmon: On the first point
we would all say not enough. The point that is made about the
link between the Home Office and the police and the combination
of a strategic priority and funding have to go hand in hand, and
we feel that there is not enough funding for active road policing
as yet. We tend to appear to move away from that priority from
the Home Office perspective and, whilst the police are making
efforts with the resources they do have, there clearly is a public
perception that all that policing is about is speed enforcement,
which of course it is not. We feel that education is a very strong
role for the police, as it is for other agencies. Funding, right
through from basic road maintenance—for which, looking into
the future, we need at least a 30% increase in our basic level
of road maintenance support to maintain the integrity of the network
and also to make improvements in passive protection too. That
is the sort of minimum figure I would say.
Mr Lines: You asked about effective
use and we are pretty good at that. We have a good data collection
process with Stats 19 and therefore we do have a good understanding
of the casualty problems, it gives us a very good foundation for
having interventions which are cost-effective. Compared to other
European countries we are certainly quite strong on that so there
is less of a worry about using the resources effectively than
there is about getting more resources and obviously more resources
mean safer roads.
Mr Salmon: I agree with Chris
but I would put a rider there about the value of education and
training in road safety which is widely perceived by everyone
involved and the public at large as a good thing, but there is
very little evidence to support that, so deciding that it is actually
effective is quite difficult, that is a point we want to emphasise.
Q111 Graham Stringer: On Mr Salmon's
previous point that a 30% increase in the budget would be welcome,
can you explain on what basis you have come to 30% and how many
lives it would save if you got that increased investment?
Mr Salmon: I come at it from two
points really. If we talk about the basic investment in intervention
through road safety schemes on the ground, accident reduction
schemes, speed management and so on, we know from our evaluation
of those schemes roughly how much it costs on average to save
one killed or seriously injured as a number and it is typically
around £100,000 per KSI (killed or seriously injured). That
is for a targeted scheme and we know from our bids for funding
where we have tried to forecast how much effort is needed for
the interventions that we put in that our bids are not necessarily
realised in full, so in that sense 30% extra would give us more
confidence about meeting or exceeding targets. The other point
is from the road maintenance side and increasing concern about
the effect of extreme climate conditions and the fairly well-understood
national position from the industry that excess inflation in the
industry is not matched by levels of funding year on year for
road maintenance, so whilst we have a low defect level that leads
directly to road accidents, probably less than 2% of casualties
caused by defects on the network, the fact is that if we do not
maintain the standard of the road that number is likely to go
up.
Q112 Mr Martlew: Can I just follow
up on that? Obviously I understand the need for road maintenance,
but the idea that you are going to get 30% I find unlikely. Is
there a list by county or perhaps, in the urban areas, a list
of accident black spots where the problem could be solved and
the casualties reduced by actually spending a specific amount
of money on that, and is there a backlog of that?
Mr Lines: The general answer to
your question is yes, and it comes back to the data point, that
we have good data so we do know where these so-called black spots
are. In a sense we have been doing it for the last 30 years and
some of them come and go as the network changes and road safety
engineers are always mindful of that. There is another aspect
of road safety engineering as well as the black spots and that
is treating what we call scatter accidents. A lot of the collisions
that occur are not clustered and there are still people being
killed and injured, so that needs a wider area-based approach
as well, we do not just treat the black spots we treat the area-wide
collisions as well. There are methods to do that and 20 mph zones
are a good example of those sorts of treatments, so it is not
just the black spots.
Q113 Mr Martlew: What I am trying
to get at is the number of people being killed is reducing but
is now reducing very slowly. If you anticipate getting X million
pounds to treat the black spots that could have a major impact
on it I suppose.
Mr Lines: Yes. As Rob says, we
know that if we spend money on engineering we get reductions in
killed and seriously injured, that is true.
Q114 Mr Clelland: If we dualled the
A1 from Newcastle to Edinburgh, what effect would that have?
Mr Lines: You would get twice
as much traffic.
Mr Skelton: As a resident who
lives alongside that road I am aware of the issues in relationship
to the dual carriageway of the A1 in particular, but the point
is that you have got three strands to road safety engineering.
You have the Highways Agency technology strategy which has been
released fairly recently and reference was made before to the
Stats 19 and the engineering that comes as a consequence of the
deliberations of the evidence and answers found there, but also
the location of the accident black spots are quite often attributed
to the siting of road safety cameras, for which there are specific
criteria which place them in those locations. I know from the
submissions that I submitted that road safety cameras are a very
emotive issue which provide a considerable amount of angst amongst
motorists, but they are there for a very sound and specific reason.
The other issue as well is that you can engineer a considerable
amount of work and, given unlimited funding, the exponential effort
to reduce the collisions becomes that much harder. I am not saying
that that should not be done but there is a recognition that the
fatalities we are talking about are within a band of young male
drivers who are causing particular concern; in other areas the
safety environments that have been built by my colleagues have
created an excellent environment but we have this small area which
is attributing far greater casualties than we can actually sustain.
Q115 Mrs Ellman: Do you think we
should be satisfied with the reduction in death and serious injury
rates over the past decade?
Mr Skelton: If I can just give
a short answer, the answer is no. Sweden fairly recently has adopted
a zero strategy; whether that is actually achievable is another
matter—because accidents will happen. I know the police
will refer to accidents as collisions because they are caused
by a combination of foreseen circumstances whereas an accident
suggests that there was no possible explanation, although there
will be some circumstances where you will end up with a very small
minority where it is difficult to attribute the cause. Every effort
should be made to reduce collisions down to the lowest possible
level and if zero is achievable it should be that, but I do hasten
to add that there will be areas that will remain unexplained.
Q116 Mrs Ellman: Does anybody else
want to comment on the areas of concern?
Mr Lines: We certainly should
not be satisfied because road deaths are the biggest cause of
accidental deaths of people in this country and, as others have
said, for young people it is particularly severe. The frustration
is that it is all avoidable, you do not have to kill these people,
we can do things about it. I look to the other modes—air,
rail, sea—where this sort of level of carnage was not acceptable
and we have done something about it, so it can be done. Again,
the Swedish zero vision—Vision Zero as they cal it—is
a very laudable one and puts us maybe in the same sort of philosophy
that we have with other modes of travel.
Mr Salmon: I agree that we are
not satisfied. We are reasonably satisfied with the effort made
so far and the reductions that we have had, but we are not happy,
certainly, with the level of fatals which has not come down as
quickly as serious injuries. It is a question, however, of how
much can we directly influence and if I may just make a reference
back to this point about increased investment, if we thought engineering
could resolve it on its own we would be asking for more than 100%
increase; the point is that there is only so much you can do with
each aspect of intervention and what we have to think about is
if we are not satisfied with the rate of reduction we have to
decide how much responsibility we need to encourage for the road
user, given that 90% of collisions are caused by human error,
so although we can intervene to mitigate that human error and
protect the motorist from whatever is out there, we cannot stop
people colliding with each other unless we build everything without
junctions, and that is physically impossible. There has to be
a responsibility out there that we have to tap, therefore, and
find some way of influencing. Where I am not satisfied with investment
over the last 10 years is back to the point of education, and
we cannot prove how good it is. I think we need to determine what
part that needs to play, what collective role government and all
the agencies play together in influencing that behaviour to get
more responsibility and less risk-taking and possibly even more
ability and awareness because many accidents are caused simply
by distraction or lack of awareness.
Mr Skelton: Just to add to the
point that Mr Salmon made there is the issue in relationship to
vehicles colliding with each other, and part and parcel of the
work that the ITS UK is doing is looking to help develop technologies
which will assist motorists in these very critical areas of being
aware of what is taking place around them. As the ITS UK submission
suggests, not all drivers are intuitive, they do not necessarily
maintain the vehicles to the proper standard, so every assistance
they can have to assist properly manufactured vehicles which are
put onto the road would be of great and considerable assistance
to them.
Q117 Mrs Ellman: How much automation
do you expect to take place to take away this risk of some of
the misjudgement factors?
Mr Skelton: It is realistic to
take a certain amount away. I went to an exhibition called the
PReVENT Exhibition last year where there was a wide range of technologies
on preventative and pre-crash technologies which helped to assist
the driver. In certain circumstances these were extremely effective,
potentially taking control of the vehicle from the driver during
particular practical situations; however that raises the whole
issue of the correct application of that technological advance
or otherwise, but these were all test models which were going
through evaluation before being considered as installations in
vehicles. Probably, colleagues on the bench will be better placed
to describe those installation potentials than I. Notwithstanding
that these technologies can assist in the reduction of casualties
by assisting the driver with the considerable overload that they
have under particular circumstances.
Q118 Mrs Ellman: What about the statistics
themselves; are we all satisfied that they are accurate? Queries
have been raised specifically about the serious injuries statistics,
looking at hospital records and so on? Does anyone have any views
on this specifically?
Mr Salmon: There is a variety
of accuracy out there, especially if you look at the data over
the last 10 years: systems have changed, training has changed
and various authorities or partnerships will have struggled at
some point to understand the blips in the data from one period
to another, so there is a degree of inaccuracy over time for the
monitoring process. Clearly, from the research done and the varying
high level mismatch between police casualty data, which is where
we get our information from, and health authority casualty data
for road accidents, in spite of research done on that, we have
not got very far with that combination. It would be nice to resolve
that problem and have a broader base of more reliable data. Inevitably
we have to work with the data that we have got, so whether it
is 90% accurate or 95% accurate is probably not too critical,
but we do recognise that there is inaccuracy there and it sometimes
would explain why we do not get a smooth curve in the monitoring
process, apart from the fact that there are random events going
on that we cannot control anyway. So the data is a bit questionable,
but on the other hand much of it is very good and we can use it
to target our activity.
Q119 Mrs Ellman: The figures also
show reductions in fatalities in walking and cycling, is that
to do with real improvements or does that really mean that fewer
people are undertaking those activities? Does anyone have a view
on that?
Mr Lines: In terms of some of
the urban areas, particularly London, there have been increases
in those, so that is not just to do with exposure as it were but
you cannot paint that picture over the whole country I think.
Overall I would suspect that there probably is more cycling and
walking and that we have actually targeted those particular vulnerable
road users. It has been a priority for road safety engineers to
target the vulnerable road user, particularly children, and again
we have been very successful in that so I think it is a real success.
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