New Clause 7
Road Safety Bill [Lords]
9:15 am
David Kidney (PPS (Mr Elliot Morley, Minister of State), Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs; Stafford, Labour)
I beg to move, That the clause be read a Second time.
Here I am again. The new clause would require that, each year, the Department for Transport report on the effects on road safety of the way that clocks are set in the United Kingdom. I have in mind that we would receive reports like that from the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents that commented on the way that we changed our clocks in 2004:
“In 2004, road deaths rose from 269 in October to 300 in November”,
which would have been just after we put the clocks back,
“and to 323 in December.”
That trend was the same with pedestrian deaths: there were 56 in that October, then we put the clocks back and the figure rose to 76 in November, and to 78 in December.
People who have analysed the matter year after year have shown consistently that at the end of October, when we put the clocks back and evenings become darker earlier, the casualty rates in this country go up. Clearly, there are road safety benefits from doing something different with our clocks in order to preserve lighter evenings, especially in the winter.