Road Safety Bill [HL]

I rise briefly to support these amendments. I declare my interest as chairman of the Rail Safety and Standards Board. The board is a company owned by the railway industry in general, not any one part of it. We do two things that are important in this debate. First, we facilitate national initiatives on areas of safety concern. We facilitate a level crossing focus group to study this area, and the overwhelming conclusion that comes out of the work of that group is that the way to address this problem is holistically involving all parties—not only all members of the industry, but the highway authorities, the police and enforcement agencies. These clauses enable that sort of action to take place to get the best possible balance. Secondly, we maintain the industry’s risk model. Because catastrophic accidents are so rare in the United Kingdom and in Europe in general, only by creating a mathematical model that looks at the trends that lead to accidents can you see where the risk is. Indeed the risk in many areas has gone down a great deal over recent years. The major cause of death is suicide and the next is trespassers, but after that the model suggests that there are only some 33 deaths a year on average on the railway. Fourteen of these will occur to passengers, 5 or 6 will occur to workers and some 14 to members of the public. When you regroup those risks and reasons, you find just under a third of them—10.35 deaths, as the model laboriously says—will come from level crossing accidents. These are the average deaths that the model predicts, and the model is constantly updated by experience. We had an example of how a passenger can die from a level-crossing accident. This is relatively rare, but when it does happen, they can be in substantial numbers. When a passenger dies, there is a risk of the driver dying, but more often it is the road user who dies. The model suggests nine drivers a year will die in level crossing accidents. The next most frequent cause of deaths on the railway is, as was mentioned, slam-doors, and that has now been driven down to below five a year by the enormous investment society has chosen to put into that sort of risk. What many of us think of as ““the railway risk””, one train crashing into another, has now been driven down to less than one a year by the investment of some £500 million in a train protection system. Safety on the railway has been purchased at a very high cost. I am not saying that is wrong, but in general society has spent a great deal of money to save lives on the railway. These clauses give us a unique opportunity to drive down risk at a very modest cost. This is what the model is for, to point out where the risk is, and these clauses help the industry get together to co-operate with local planning authorities to drive down the risk. There is no question that they would create substantial improvement. My company and Network Rail will be doing some further work to try and estimate this, but it is bound to be 20 or 30 per cent, and this will save some real lives. I will speak briefly about the clauses because my noble friend has set them out very well. If we get Clause 140 right—although it will need negotiating—local highway authorities, knowing that an order can be made, will work with the railway to seek the best possible protective solution at an individual crossing. There will be some quibbling in the Department for Transport—I worked for the Department for Transport for many years and find it difficult to speak about it without an expletive—about who pays what. But that is not important. At the end of the day, with the amount of money we spend on safety in the railway, this will be a modest sum for a real gain. I am sure that the Department for Transport, if it adequately consults all stakeholders, can find a sensible way to sort out the cost. The key is that the highway authorities and other stakeholders must work together. Amendment No. 140 will give it the teeth to cause that to happen. Amendment No. 141 moves the burden on to the planning authority. At the moment the planning authority decides whether to consult with the railway. The effect of this amendment will be to force it to consult with the railway. When you look at traffic studies and how a new housing development or new shopping development can impact on traffic many miles away from the development, it is clearly essential that the infrastructure operator, Network Rail, is involved in these major developments. One has to remember that within the planning law, once the consultation takes place, planning authorities have the powers to negotiate and/or to impose conditions on developers which for instance, at a very rarely used crossing, may show that a bridge is necessary. In the planning agreement those powers can be introduced and such incidents can be avoided. Amendment No. 141 will be a very good provision to that effect. I do not want the Minister to agree to it now, and I certainly do not want to have a vote—we have better things to do—but it is essential that the department consult with the industry and other stakeholders at a senior level between now and Report and come forward with amendments to give effect to the very good intentions in this group of amendments.