Roadside Recovery Vehicles: Red Lights

Part of the debate – in Westminster Hall at 11:00 am on 23 July 2019.

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Photo of Tracey Crouch Tracey Crouch Conservative, Chatham and Aylesford 11:00, 23 July 2019

That will be the focus of my speech. There are nearly half a million roadside recovery operators, in a variety of guises, who deserve protection. There are many parts to the wider campaign, but I want to focus on one specific call: to allow the use of red lights by the roadside recovery industry. We are simply asking for recovery operators to be permitted to use prominent red warning beacons while attending accidents and breakdowns on the hard shoulder or on other roads; I know that my right hon. Friend the Member for Hemel Hempstead has particular concerns around countryside roads in his area.

This campaign is supported by the wider industry of both independent firms and nationwide operators such as the RAC and the AA, and I am grateful for their briefings. Evidence given by the AA suggested that although UK motorways are the safest roads to drive on when calculated using serious accidents per billion miles, they are also the most dangerous to work on as a breakdown patrol or vehicle recovery operator; there have been at least three known fatalities of operators in the past 18 months.

There is a firm view within the industry that the use of red lights while attending a breakdown would alter behaviours enough for drivers to become more cautionary in their approach, and there is enough science to back this up. In a previous speech in the House on the wider campaign, I referenced the Rayleigh effect, which means that red can be seen from further away. With significant help from Stephen Westland, a professor of colour science at Leeds University, and Hugh Barton, from Opticonsulting Ltd, I have learned a lot more on this, including regarding the neurological response to red.

Mr Barton helpfully points out that red light as a danger signal can be traced back to the 1820s, when the first passenger trains were signalled using red, green and white flags, which were later replaced by red and green semaphore signals. Red is a useful colour for long-range warning signals, because it suffers from atmospheric scatter to a lesser degree than other colours, due to the effects of Rayleigh and Mie scattering processes: at the limit of visual detection red lights are seen as red, whereas other colours are seen as lights with no specific colour attribute.

Professor Westland provided me with some comments regarding the psychological aspect of red and its association with stop and danger. In a traffic situation, everyone knows that red means stop and danger. He kindly forwarded me an interesting paper in an ergonomics journal, which provided some interesting data on this. In one experiment, for example, the researchers presented words on a screen in one of three colours: red, grey or green. Participants had to categorise the words as being danger words or safety words. The reaction time to identify the words in the danger category was quicker when the words were red than when they were green or grey. The same sort of effect was found with danger symbols rather than words: red danger symbols are more quickly categorised as danger symbols than, say, green danger symbols. In other words, although this is a psychological effect, there are implications for performance. One could rightly surmise that a driver noticing a red light on the hard shoulder would be more likely to slow down than if they saw an orange light, and their reaction times would likely be quicker.

With that science in mind, I ask the Minister to review the Road Vehicles Lighting Regulations 1989, which currently prohibit roadside recovery vehicles from using red lights. This change in policy can be easily implemented. Highways England vehicles have recently joined the fire service in being exempt from these regulations via a statutory instrument; they are permitted to use red lights in their regulation of traffic around accidents and other road incidents. The Campaign for Safer Roadside Rescue and Recovery argue that the work that roadside workers do on the side of the road, whether a motorway or a country lane, is dangerous and ought to receive the same level of protection. I would argue that, too. The issue is not just their safety, but the safety of those they are there to help.

Before I conclude, it would be remiss of me not to mention that one in 12 men and one in 200 women are colour blind. Although the primary purpose of this debate is to call for a change of use from amber to red beacons to protect recovery workers, for some it would make less of a difference. Perhaps part of a review could be to consider how we support colour blind drivers too, perhaps through shaping or flashing techniques within the beacon.