Our Research Manager, Dr James Broun, on what the new Government can do to reduce deaths and injuries on the road.

On 5 July, the UK woke up to a new Government and a new prime minister. After 14 years of Conservative-led rule, the Labour Party are in power with a huge majority in Parliament and a commitment to drive ‘change’. What should be top of the new Government’s in-tray when it comes to road safety?

Historically, the UK has been a global leader in road safety. The 1980s and early 2000s saw massive reductions in road fatalities, partly due to campaigns around seatbelt wearing, drink-driving and mobile phone use – campaigns which RoSPA spearheaded. The decade 2004 to 2013 saw a 47 per cent reduction in road fatalities. However, in the decade since, the reduction has only been 7 per cent.

While any progress is a good thing, in retrospect this latest decade looks like a wasted opportunity – a period of stagnation in road safety. Indeed, our European neighbours have mostly outpaced us. The UK’s road fatality reduction rate was the fifth-worst in the EU27 across this period. Sadly, in 2023, 1,645 people died on British roads and almost 28,000 more were seriously injured.

As someone relatively new to the sector I find these figures staggering. Of course they were much higher in the past, but can you imagine proposing a new mass transit system to the Government on the basis that it would ‘only’ kill or seriously injure 30,000 people a year? You’d be laughed out of the room. So we should not accept this status quo just because it’s what we’ve inherited.

Another, important consideration is that road safety has not kept pace with workplace safety. Sterling efforts by business, unions, and local authorities to keep employees safe are at risk of being undermined as soon as people leave the workplace and get in a car.

There is still much more to do. Accidents don’t have to happen. As earlier periods show, the implementation and enforcement of strategic, evidence-led, sensible policy changes can save thousands of lives and reduce the accident burden on the roads. Effective communication can quickly secure public buy-in. Party politics shouldn’t come into this: the Labour Government can rightly look back to the Blair-Brown years as a time of enormous progress in this area, but they can also cast their eyes back to the Thatcher and Major years, which saw significant reductions too. Viewed this way, it’s clear that the last decade or so of sluggish progress was a blip – but a long and costly one. It is a reminder that while political decisions can improve accident rates, a lack of initiative can have the opposite effect.

The next Government must act decisively. So what should it do to regain momentum? In the election campaign we heard a lot about potholes which are a major nuisance (and potentially a damaging one!), but these are essentially an issue of day-to-day maintenance rather than one of major strategic significance. We of course want the Government to fix them, but RoSPA is also calling on the Government to:

• Implement a National Road Safety Strategy that accounts for accident prevention and response, and has evidence-led targets and KPIs. Despite repeated calls from across the sector, England (unlike Scotland, Wales, and the Ministry of Defence) still has no road safety strategy, which contributes to the lack of long-term planning around accident reduction.
• Introduce Graduated Driver Licensing, which would limit young drivers from undertaking high-risk driving activities. Sadly, this age group remains at the highest risk of being involved in a road traffic collision, in part because of a lack of experience. Official statistics show that the rate of people killed or seriously injured on the roads is 64 per cent higher for drivers aged 17 to 25 than for over-25s. We are calling on the Government to implement pragmatic limits on some activities for young drivers where they are known to amplify the risk of a crash.

We were already putting this message to Labour’s frontbench before the election, including by hosting a roundtable with the Shadow Roads Minister, Bill Esterson, at the end of 2023. Mr Esterson was not made Roads Minister in the new Government, but we have already written to the new Transport Secretary, Louise Haigh, and the new Roads Minister, Lilian Greenwood, to argue our case.

Both bring a wealth of experience to this role: Haigh was the Shadow Transport Secretary for three years before the election, while Greenwood was chair of the House of Commons Transport Committee from 2017 to 2020 and Shadow Transport Secretary from 2015 to 2016. We welcome them to their roles and look forward to working with them to kickstart progress again. Indeed, I was pleased to recently meet Ms Greenwood at a roundtable hosted by the
Department of Transport, where I joined others in the sector to make a clear case for strategic change.

We are also going to ramp up our engagement with the Transport Select Committee to support their scrutiny of the Government, and we will be engaging with relevant all-party parliamentary groups too.

We are pushing this message in partnership with other players in our sector, because a chorus is always louder than a lone voice. Along with 32 other organisations, we have endorsed the Parliamentary Advisory Council for Transport Safety’s manifesto – and are supporting sector-wide calls for government to ramp up action and reduce road fatalities.

RoSPA will continue to campaign on this issue until the Government take action. We want to make sure that the new Government recognise the enormous opportunity they have to make our roads safer, save lives and put the UK back on track to leading the way in road safety.

Dr James Broun is the Research Manager at RoSPA. He is an experienced researcher, policy advisor and public affairs practitioner.