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 am grateful to my hon. Friend for that point. Greater minds than I, particularly those at the Transport Research Laboratory, have researched that matter, and it seems that casualty rates are highest at dusk. Is he asking whether, if we change the time of dusk, that casualty rate would move to the new time, or whether we would actually remove it altogether? The TRL’s judgment is that we would remove the accidents and casualties an hour later because most people make their journeys by the clock. For example, it is the time, not dusk, that determines when people finish and go home from school or work, or go somewhere before going home. Nevertheless, we must be careful not to turn this into a debate about putting the clocks forward or back, because that is beyond the scope of the Bill or the new clause.
I shall provide some background so that people understand. Currently in this country, in winter time—October to March—we are on Greenwich mean time. In the summer months—March to October—we are on Greenwich mean time, plus one hour, and moving the clocks forward by one hour in March means that we have one extra hour of daylight in the evening.
Between 1968 and 1971, an experiment was carried out. In March 1968, the clocks were put forward by one hour, and were left there until October 1971. That was known as British standard time, during which road safety was monitored. After making the necessary adjustments, the Transport Research Laboratory concluded that, per winter, during the experiment, 1,120 fewer people were killed or seriously injured on our roads. That included 230 fewer fatalities. That was, to me, quite a significant change.
There have been some further assessments of whether the effect that was seen in 1968 to 1971 would still hold good today. I asked the Minister a written parliamentary question and he confirmed that the TRL had updated its estimate of the effects of changing daylight time. He said that the conclusion was that
“there could be a reduction in road casualties of over 400 people killed or seriously injured per year in Great Britain, including 100 deaths.”—[Official Report, 9 November 2005; Vol. 439,c. 514W.]
In actual fact, looking at the research, 450 fewer people would be killed or seriously injured, which includes between 104 and 138 fewer fatalities.
We can clearly make road safety gains if we change the way in which we set our clocks in this country. If a report set out year after year the trend that every October, November and December saw a rising number of deaths on our roads coinciding with when we put the clocks back, one day the penny would drop that there is a good safety argument for not putting the clocks back. For completeness, my favourite approach would be in the winter to have GMT plus one hour, and in the summer GMT plus two hours, which people call single/double summer time.
The Bill is not the vehicle to change the way in which we set our clocks. That is a reserved matter for the whole of the United Kingdom, although I note that in the other place Lord Tanlaw suggested a pilot for three years of single-double summer time in England only, allowing the devolved authorities to join in with the experiment if they wanted. Clearly, there are wider implications than just road safety. There are many positive reasons beyond road safety for why we should make that change, but for today I am asking for the Minister to agree that there should be an annual report on the road safety consequences of what we do with our clocks in order to see whether the Department for Transport, at least, would support making that change.