My Lords, it is good that the Government have realised that our road traffic laws are a mess, because the cost—the human cost, the social cost—of the crimes and offences we are talking about is extremely high. When we think of the cost of the deaths and injuries to the NHS, to social services, to the emergency services, we are talking about billions of pounds and we really ought to understand that a lot of the causes are avoidable.
When I first got on to the Met Police authority, I went out a lot with the traffic teams—I have told this story before—and one sergeant said to me, “If I wanted to murder somebody, I would run them over with a car, because nobody could ever prove it was not an accident”. This brings me to the word “accident”, which we really should not use when we are talking about road collisions, road incidents and so on. It offends me and the whole road safety community deeply, because the minute you use the word “accident”, you are judging the cause of whatever happened and that is obviously unfair. You have to look into what really happened.
The most dangerous idea is people who should be disqualified from driving being able to plead exceptional hardship. We have heard a lot about “exceptional hardship”: what a misnomer. People are often allowed to keep on driving and quite honestly, they should feel lucky that they have not gone to prison because a lot of the time, it is complete nonsense. I have read about a lot of cases where the judge or the magistrate allowed someone to get away with—well, not murder, but certainly manslaughter at times. It is obviously a crime against society, not to mention the families themselves.
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Any driver who is no longer allowed to drive will experience hardship—that is obvious, but the solution is not to accumulate so many points on your licence that you are a danger to society. Amendment 63 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, helps to close the loophole that lets dangerous drivers stay on the roads. I am not sure whether he will push to a vote. I would vote on every amendment in this group because I think they are extremely important, but, if the Government are going to do a review, it will be worth waiting for that provided that it does not take too long and covers the issues that need sorting.
Amendment 64 will help to ensure that people report road traffic collisions to the police, especially when injuries have been caused. Importantly, it also begins to fix the false assumption in the legislation that
people are not necessarily responsible. Again, when you use the word “accident”, you suggest that no one is responsible. We have to change our language; it is incredibly important. We talk all the time about road safety. Road safety is the solution to the problem we have—which is road danger. I am afraid that I completely forgot to say to your Lordships that I am the esteemed president of the Road Danger Reduction Forum, which does an incredible job.