Road Safety Bill [HL]

moved Amendment No. 28:"After Clause 9, insert the following new clause—"    ““ENDORSABLE OFFENCES (1)   In section 15 of the Road Traffic Act 1988 (c. 52)— (a)   in subsection (1), for ““fourteen”” substitute ““sixteen””; (b)   in subsection (3), for ““fourteen”” substitute ““sixteen””. (2)   In Part 1 of Schedule 2 to the Road Traffic Offenders Act   1988 (c. 53) (prosecution and punishment of offences)— (a)   in the entry relating to RTA section 14, in column (6) insert ““Obligatory.””; (b)   in the entry relating to RTA section 15(2), in column (6) insert ““Obligatory””; (c)   in the entry relating to RTA section 15(4), in column (6) insert ““Obligatory””.”” The noble Lord said: I start from the premise that the Government’s intention is to include in the Bill the fact that the use of a hand-held mobile telephone will become an endorsable offence. That has long been expected. Therefore, I want to talk about another endorsable offence; namely the wearing of seat belts. It has been the case for a long time that the department, which is well represented over there, has resisted the addition of an endorsable offence of using a hand-held mobile telephone because it is not actually a driving offence. It is not actually to do with driving a car. It is something else: it is using a mobile phone. By the same token, I believe that they have regarded not wearing a seat belt as not a driving offence—it is not to do with the conduct of a vehicle; it is an offence that is an adjunct to it, but not an offence of driving the vehicle. My concern is that to reach the casualty targets that the Government have set themselves during the next few years, a number of bold initiatives must be undertaken. As I said, they have traded strongly on the fact that the design of cars has become so much better over the years that casualty rates had been reduced—not, may I say, through anything that the Government have done but because car manufacturers have made cars much safer and pedestrians and cyclists have been frightened off the road. The use of pedal cycles and the amount of walking adjacent to roads has reduced. Although people apparently trumpet the fact that motorways are the safest roads in the country, if one takes into account the fact that no one walks on a motorway—or few people do—and no one cycles on a motorway, the reason that they are the safest roads in the country is because there are no cyclists or pedestrians to knock down. The car drivers who drive into each other kill each other, but there are fewer collisions on motorways because there are no road junctions, where most collisions take place. The intersections on motorways are engineered to avoid collisions. That is why they are the safest roads. They are the safest roads not because people behave themselves well on them but for many other reasons. As far as I know, there are no collision statistics collected centrally about the wearing of seat belts. If you ask people after an accident whether they were wearing a seat belt, if they are alive to answer, they will invariably answer yes. It is similar to signals passed at danger on the railway: if you ask a train driver whether he has passed a signal at danger, he will invariably answer no, because he actually thinks that the signal was green. The driver actually believes that he was wearing a seat belt. It is psychological, not a fact. Despite the fact that people say that they are wearing seat belts, the wearing rate is very poor. Figures that the DfT has collected show that 7 per cent of car drivers do not wear seat belts and about one-third of adults in the rear do not wear them either. In the Thames Valley, we have come to the conclusion that about one-third of schoolchildren do not wear seat belts. I referred to a more detailed study on Second Reading. In the past three years, those people who were driving or in cars—I am not talking about pedestrians, cyclists or motorcyclists, because they do not wear seat belts—40 per cent of front seat and 54   per cent of rear seat occupants who were killed were not wearing seat belts. That is an enormous number, and that is a fact. That is not me speculating or telling the House a fable. Also, if you look at photographs of car accidents, as I have done, I can show you horrendous accidents of cars down banks, up against trees or smashed into lamp posts. Where the occupant was wearing a seat belt, he has almost always walked away. On the other hand, I can show you another series of accidents where the car windscreen may be slightly broken and where the car is not a write-off, but the occupant is dead because he was not wearing a seat belt. The facts are the simple facts; it is not me embroidering them. If someone is ejected from a car after a collision, he is 25 times more likely to be killed than if he is restrained in the car by a seat belt. It will not surprise the Committee to know that an unrestrained driver, passenger or even a dog is a great danger to everyone else inside the car because, when the car hits something, they fly about inside the car. We have had these facts investigated by Frank   McKenna of the University of Reading, who is an expert on the subject—these are not speculative figures, which is why I am detaining the Committee for longer than I normally would. He has shown that if you catch someone speeding and offer them, as we do, an opportunity to go on a speed awareness course, the take-up rate is about 85 per cent. People do not want the penalty points; they will go on the speed awareness course; that is effective in changing their attitude. Some people it has no effect on, but others it does. However, if we offer someone whom we have caught not wearing a seat belt the opportunity to go on a course to consider the effects of not wearing a seat belt—we have lots of smashed up cars and pictures of people who are dead—only 10 per cent of them do so. That leads us to believe that the motivating factor is that if you do not wear a seat belt and a police officer stops you—something of an occasion, because you do not often get stopped by a police officer in uniform—he gives you a fixed penalty notice of £30. Nowadays, that is almost less than you pay to park in many places; it is a derisory fine. It has become almost the small change of motoring fines. Yet that is what you are fined if you do not wear a seat belt. Further, under Home Office circular 7/1997, a fixed penalty can be issued only to people over 16. So although people under 14 are the responsibility of their parents, those between 14 and 16 who are not wearing seat belts are in the anomalous position where the police can take them to court but the court has no means of disposing of the offence. They cannot fine them £30 because they are not 16, and there are no other means of disposing of the case. I have tried at length to say to the Government that if they are serious about reducing road casualties, they should accept this proposal as a way of doing so. I am fairly certain that if the penalty for not wearing a seat belt were three or even two penalty points, people would wear a seat belt, and I can guarantee that the accident rate in the country would decrease. There are few measures requiring no expenditure that would result in an immediate reduction in casualties; this   is one of them, and it is why I am moving the amendment. I seriously want the Government to take notice. I am not making up the evidence; it is real. I should like to know that the Minister will at least consider it seriously. I beg to move.