Clause 1 - Road safety grants
Road Safety Bill
9:45 am
Mr Christopher Chope (Shadow Minister, Environment and Transport; Christchurch, Conservative)
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. We intend to get away from unnecessary bureaucracy, and we regard the safety camera partnerships as unnecessarily bureaucratic. There is nothing that they do that cannot be done by the police authorities on their own. Indeed, there is a system of divide and rule that is causing a lot of confusion for the public. I have passed on correspondence from constituents to the police authority, which has replied, ''That has nothing to do with us. It is the responsibility of the safety camera partnership.'' Similarly, the local authority said, ''It has nothing to do with us. It's the responsibility of the safety camera partnerships.''
The partnerships have a lot of money. I estimate the yield from fines to be between £60 million and £100 million per annum because the number of speeding offences has increased under the Government from about 600,000 in 1996 to the best part of 4 million, based on the figures available.
The partnerships have an enormous amount of income and many people might ask why some of that money cannot be reinvested on speed indicator signs, so that people are warned that they are exceeding the speed limit. Those signs do not incur any penalty if one does not comply with them, but they have a good impact in improving road safety and ensuring that people reduce their speed. The trouble is that it costs money to put those signs up, and many local authorities say that they have not got the resources to do that. Why have they not got those resources? Because the Government will not allow them to reinvest the money that is coming into safety camera partnerships from fines because the money is being sent to the Home Office.
The only money that can be reinvested from safety camera partnerships is in propaganda, which has always been the top priority of the Government, and in putting up more cameras. We believe that prevention is better than cure, and we would like to see some of the money being invested in road safety measures, through engineering and education. We shall come on later to discuss driver-improvement courses.
Even the administration of those courses can require funds. The courses run under the auspices of many police authorities, such as the BikeSafe courses, require money. We believe that it would be much simpler if those road safety measures could be funded out of fine and penalty income, rather than have that income going to the Government to be recycled and churned, creating a lot more bureaucracy and work for officialdom and reducing the amount of money available for front-line road safety improvements. I hope that the Minister will answer some of our concerns.