War on Safety

If you believed every word of our cynical press, you would never consider Britain to be top of any world league at all. But the almost total uncelebrated fact is Britain's roads are the safest in the world, beating notoriously cautious and sensible nations like Germany, Sweden and Japan.

The remarkable achievement is owing to the successful introduction of technology, enforcement and advertising over a sustained period. Although every new measure, like the breathalyser has been fought fiercely by a small vocal army of reactionaries, successive Governments have resisted their unscientific claims and spurious appeals to a personal right to liberty.

Until now. Step forward the Coalition Government's prize fool, 'Road Safety' Minister, Mike Penning. His mindless boasting of the new Government's intention to be rid of most of the country's speed cameras will start to reverse 45 years of steady reduction in road deaths, from about 8,000 in 1967 to less than 3,000 last year.

Said Penning, "This is another example of this Government delivering on its pledge to end the war on the motorist." Or, to put it another way, this is another policy entirely based on plainly disprovable nonsense derived from Daily Mail editorials.

A third of road deaths are caused by excessive speed and speed cameras save lives by the most efficient means. There is no study which can disprove that. Leaving aside the human cost of a road death, each one costs the country's emergency services and NHS about £1m, so cutting £50m from road safety budgets will prove to be actually more expensive if the numbers of dead motorists, cyclists and pedestrians grow by just a four or five dozen.

As previous Home Secretary Alan Johnson put it, the Tories have adopted "a saloon bar view." I wonder what hope there remains for plans to lower the drink-drive level in line with the EU average. Looking pretty bleak, I fear.

Other comparably developed countries look jealously at the huge savings Britain makes through road safety where Italy has double the proportion of road deaths and the US treble. Only the most short-sighted, small minded Government would contemplate conceding effortlessly to the road hog lobby. These Ministers do not appear to be fully in control of the vehicle.