New Clause 7
Road Safety Bill [Lords]
9:15 am
Stephen Hammond (Shadow Minister, Transport; Wimbledon, Conservative)
I was remiss earlier, Mrs. Anderson. I welcome you back to the Chair after Easter and I trust you had a good break.
The new clause, as the hon. Gentleman has said, would require a report on the impact on road safety for 12 months and another for each subsequent 12 months, and would allow the Minister to publish those reports and lay them as and where he sees fit. It does not call for any action at this stage.
Many of us will have received a briefing from the Longer Day UK group, which makes some claims about the number of road deaths that could be avoided. It gave the TRL estimates of how many casualties could have been avoided over 25 years if we changed to what it calls the daytime-saving timetable: 20,000, starting from 1971. Unfortunately, the table that it presents for us only starts from 1975, so it is difficult to make a real estimate of whether that is right. It also brushes aside any comments about safety to cyclists that have been raised. I am sure that there is detailed methodology in it somewhere, but we have yet to see it. It also talks clearly about a number of other benefits outside the scope of the Committee’s deliberations.
I listened to the hon. Gentleman’s comments about the experiment between 1968 and 1971, prior to the Summer Time Act 1972, when we had the extra hour in place for three years. He cited a set of numbers, which were supposedly the benefit of that experiment. However, there are other quotations. The Government have said that the method was piloted between 1968 and 1971, and that some findings estimate 2,500 deaths and serious injuries occurred each year as a result. The hon. Gentleman talked about the most up-to-date evidence from the TRL and quoted the Minister from November last year, but the Minister was probably just citing the numbers relating to the savings that were already established as a result of the 1968 to 1971 survey. Lord Sainsbury, who was answering for the Government in another place, said that the facts were that we
“would save 100 lives and 300 serious injuries each year.” —[Official Report, House of Lords, 7 November 2005; Vol. 675, c. 389.]
Those figures are based on the 1968 to 1971 survey, and seem to be the established numbers. There is some controversy about the numbers, and we clearly need to examine a number of other sources, not just the road safety ones. The Government say that the experiment proved unpopular at the time.
I find it difficult to support the new clause, because it is likely to be highly restrictive. If we were to think about moving to GMT plus one for the whole year, we would need to look at considerably more aspects than road safety, which would mean another report and another set of costs. The experiment has been done once before in relation to road safety and we know the facts.