Road Safety Bill [HL]

This issue has been debated for the past 30 years. I thought for a moment that we were in danger of debating it for the next 30 years, but I am grateful for the succinct comments that everybody has made in this interesting debate. The noble Earl, Lord Attlee, spoke about the enormous difficulty in this country of adjusting to different road-length measurements. That is as nothing, I should have thought, to the difficulty faced by the continental driver who finds that we drive on the other side of the road. Drivers have to have the skills to cope with that and do so well. Therefore, I think the issue of calculation of distances can be greatly exaggerated. Suffice it to say that if we went metric with our road signs we would need substantial preparation. The idea that we might slip it in on a wet October afternoon in a modest, unostentatious little Bill such as this, having made no attempt to prepare the nation for the shock of waking up to this change is obviously risible. The noble Earl, Lord Attlee, never fails to trigger wide-ranging debates. On this occasion, he has not perhaps derived quite the degree of support that he might have expected. Bridge heights are often expressed in metric measurements on signs because we are mindful of the fact that lorries colliding with bridges is a potential hazard, although it seems that many home-grown buses and lorries collide with bridges, but very few double-decker buses come from overseas. I hear what the noble Earl says. The innovation of the national cycle group never ceases to amaze me. I wholly applaud everything it does, and if it shortens the pain for cyclists by convincing them they are doing rather more than they have done, that is a plus. However, a newly-created national route is different from translating policy on to all our roads. Noble Lords will recognise that we would want just one obvious pattern. I would not want to guess at official Conservative Party policy—although I am delighted that this amendment is not their policy—but I am sure they will be as persuaded as I am that there are substantial costs involved in changing the mileage on every road sign in Britain to metric. It would be a significant measure that one would not take on light-heartedly. We would need preparation on a huge scale. I congratulate the noble Earl, Lord Attlee, on having aired this important issue again, but this is not the place to effect such a radical change. I hope that he will withdraw the amendment.