Road Safety Bill [HL]

I support the amendments moved by the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley. There is a series of these amendments, and it is long overdue that our attention was turned to them. Again I enter the caveat that I cannot say these amendments are perfectly drawn, but the situations they cover are well understood. On the railways, since the installation of TPWS and the phasing out of doors that are not controlled, level crossings remain the biggest single likely cause of a rail accident. On the scale of things, an accident is bound to occur every so often, but the possibility of a serious accident really is there. I draw attention to the fact that the traffic authority controlling a level crossing has a lot of duty beside that of Network Rail. It is responsible for ensuring that the road is constructed safely. It also has a duty, in my book, towards developments in the area of a level crossing. Certainly people who negotiate around the lights at a crossing—and there are plenty of cases of this—should suffer a serious penalty. Getting six penalty points is taking the matter seriously. If you get three points for passing a speed camera, you want at least twice that for going around past a red light at a level crossing, because that is extremely dangerous. So far as bridge bashing is concerned, I was surprised by the figures quoted by the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley. If I heard them right, it was 2,343 accidents and 25,000 minutes. However, that only amounts to just over 10 minutes of delay. I have been on a bridge bash. In fact lots of trains are frequently delayed for several hours by bridge bashes. The figures may be slightly wrong somewhere. I have recently been in Sweden and have seen the structures they erect there in front of bridges to protect them. They are not whacking great RSJs placed across the road, but fairly flimsy uprights with a lattice across. If a lorry hits them, they fall down and possibly damage the lorry, but it does not hit the bridge. It makes a hell of a noise, I should think, when the thing comes clattering down around the front of a lorry, but I do not think that need concern us. It is possible to design something that will put an end to bridge bashing. The sites where bridge bashes occur are well-known, and it is seems nonsense that we go on year after year ignoring this problem when it could be simply addressed.