Examination of Witnesses (Question Numbers
151-159)
MR KEVIN
CLINTON, MR
STEVE THORNTON,
MR STEVE
GREEN, MR
STUART SMITH
AND MS
JAN BERRY
30 APRIL 2008
Q151 Mr Clelland: Welcome to this session
on road safety; could I just ask the witnesses to identify themselves
for the purposes of the record, starting to my left?
Mr Smith: Stuart Smith, Chief
Fire Officers' Association.
Ms Berry: Jan Berry of the Police
Federation of England and Wales.
Mr Clinton: Kevin Clinton, Royal
Society for the Prevention of Accidents.
Mr Thornton: I am Steve Thornton,
I am Chair of the West Yorkshire Safer Roads Partnership.
Mr Green: Steve Green, Association
of Chief Police Officers.
Q152 Mr Clelland: Could you, in your
view, tell me what the role of government is in relation to road
safety?
Mr Clinton: I would say that the
role of government really is about leadership, setting the agenda
for road safety and certainly about setting strategies and targets,
co-ordination and funding is obviously very important. I would
also say that it is the role of government to act as an exemplar
in road safety. It is a major employer, it uses lots of vehicles
on the road itself and therefore there is a role for government
in setting a good example in the way its civil servants and its
politicians and ministers use the road themselves.
Mr Thornton: I would agree with
Kevin on that but there are real issues around consistency from
government which have not helped the way we have delivered road
safety in the past. There also needs to be recognition of the
different conditions in different areas of the country.
Ms Berry: I would not actually
disagree with either of the previous comments but where responsibility
lies between different government departments there is a responsibility
for those government departments to work together and there can
be an element of fragmentation in the way in which targets are
set, how they complement each other or, rather, how sometimes
they compete with each other.
Mr Green: I just wanted to say
the same as Jan Berry has said, I think that responsibility for
the different departments, particularly the Home Office and the
Department for Transport, is one of the key conditions that they
can set. It is better than it was, in fairness, and I know that
there is a much better link-up at ministerial level between the
relevant ministers, but I still think that it can be very difficult
to get the two departments to work together.
Q153 Mr Clelland: Are there other
government departments, apart from the Department for Transport,
which should be concerned with road safety and taking a greater
role?
Mr Smith: The fire and rescue
service have come onto the road safety scene, as it were, quite
recently following changes in the legislation for the fire and
rescue service, so we now have a responsibility for road traffic
accidents that did not exist before 2005. Certainly in terms of
being the relative new kids on the block as it were in terms of
road safety, there has been some scepticism about our involvement
and there has been a reluctance from government departments to
encourage our involvement in that respect, so it has very much
been a service-led approach.
Mr Green: I have here today's
statistics issued around motoring offences and better statistics
issued by the Ministry of Justice, so there is another department
involved as well. If I may say as well, Chairman, that feeds through,
as well as joining the departments together, into joining the
inspectorates together as well because different parent bodies
have different inspectorates, and therefore there are different
inspectorate regimes for different agencies that are actually
working on the ground.
Q154 Mr Clelland: There is room for
improvement in the way that the departments work with each other.
Mr Green: It is joining it up.
Mr Clinton: Particularly with
the inspectorates. The HSE has a very important role in road safety
and one of RoSPA's concerns is that it is not really proactive
enough in terms of ensuring that employers are dealing with their
road safety risks and managing those in the same way as they should
do with any other health and safety risk. Education has been mentioned
a lot so the Department for Children, Schools and Families is
clearly a crucial department as far as road safety is concerned.
Mr Thornton: I would certainly
second that; we are also working with the Department for Communities
and Local Government, the Department of Health as well as through
education, so there is a great deal of work that we are doing
with other agencies.
Q155 Clive Efford: Have the current
reduction targets been helpful in improving road safety?
Mr Clinton: I would certainly
say that they have been a tremendous help. They have been crucial
in terms of setting priorities and in generating resources from
central and local government and also helping to get the message
across publicly that road safety is an important issue. It has
been crucial that when they were created that was done on a solid
evidence base according to accident data and research and it is
also crucial that we have had this approach for over 20 years
now, since the mid-1980s, and continuing that as we go into the
next few decades certainly should be a priority.
Mr Thornton: It has been a tremendous
driver for people around the country with targets to aim for and
it is something we can now build on to make sure those targets
are applicable locally and prove more successful locally.
Mr Green: Again, I would just
echo the same; it has been helpful. One of the reasons it has
been helpful is that it has helped to focus partnership activity
at a local level and also the beauty of the road safety strategy
is that it is so simple, there is nothing complicated about it
and people can understand it in very simple terms. There was a
problem which I hope has been rectified but the Home Office measured
the effectiveness of roads policing by a different measure to
the road safety strategy target which in effect gave two different
pictures of who was successful and who was not. We are assured
that that will be corrected in the new performance framework but
any urging that you can give to make sure that they are aligned
would be very helpful because what is important is that when people
sit at the partnership table every agency there has got the same
definition of success. That has not been the case in the past.
Ms Berry: From the point of view
of targets one of the main functions of policing is around enforcement
and whilst the targets can be important, if there are no targets
relating to enforcement of road traffic legislation then in this
day and age of policing if it is not counted it will be discounted
and that is, I think, not helpful in terms of safety and security
on the roads.
Mr Smith: If I could comment in
terms of targets and the local area agreements which many of the
agencies are now involved in, where they are appearing as priorities
for counties and local authorities it is encouraging the partnership
arrangements to focus on mutually agreed and supportive targets
so it is a useful concept.
Ms Berry: Just on that very point
actually there is a huge difference between the local agreements
and the targets set for the police service from the Home Office
and unless these things complement each other it is really confusing
for police officers on the ground and also for BCU commanders
who are being pulled in one direction by their chief officers
and being pulled in another direction by their local partners.
Very often money comes with the local partners and therefore there
is a drag in that direction; then of course they miss the targets
in another direction which causes confusion.
Q156 Clive Efford: Bearing that in
mind when you answer this question, what targets should we have
for the period beyond 2010?
Mr Clinton: We should be looking
to have a target specifically for deaths because as you mentioned
in the earlier session there has been a difference between progress
on serious injury and progress on deaths. I think we should look
carefully at whether it would be useful to have targets for particular
road user groups such as motorcyclists, in particular, because
their numbers have been going up. There is certainly a role for
a vision in addition to targets; Vision Zero in Sweden has been
mentioned a lot today and I think what is not understood is that
Sweden also has casualty reduction targets in terms of numbers,
similar to the way we do here. They have not set a date for Vision
Zero so they have not said by the year 2020 we are going to have
no deaths on our roads, so there is a difference between a vision
and targets and there is a role for both.
Mr Thornton: Government research
will give you some indication of what is achievable in the next
10 years as it did over the last 10 years. That was a guide for
setting targets which was then taken on by ministers and put into
the national road safety strategy.
Q157 Clive Efford: On the point about
having separate targets for deaths and serious injuries, Mr Clinton
made the point that there should be separate targets. You do not
have to elaborate but do you all agree with that point?
Mr Green: Yes.
Mr Thornton: Yes.
Q158 Clive Efford: What about slight
injuries?
Mr Clinton: They are much more
difficult because, first of all, under reporting we do not really
have an idea of how many slight injuries are out there. We have
currently a target which, if I remember rightly, is a rate for
slight injuries and while they are important, for me the deaths
and serious injuries are more important. Slight injuries certainly
should not be ignored but I think there may be an issue if we
have too many targets.
Q159 Clive Efford: Is the public
ready to accept radical measures that may involve restrictions
on personal freedoms that they have enjoyed up to now?
Mr Clinton: We have seen with
cameras that you get different opinions on whether they are a
good thing or a bad thing. One thing is we need to sell the reasons
for these things better and we certainly need to be talking about
personal responsibility and the fact that roads are a shared space,
so although we should have personal freedom we have not got the
right to put other people at risk by the way we exercise our own
freedom.
Mr Green: We need to be really
clear about what you mean by "the public" because my
perception, having been involved in roads policing for 10 years
now for ACPO, is that I can see three segments. On one extreme
are what you might call the motoring lobby who are very sceptical
about any apparent restriction placed on their freedom.
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