Published : Friday, 15 May 2009
Lives are being lost on our roads because no statutory body exists to investigate traffic accidents, a leading motoring group has claimed.
The RAC Foundation is now calling for the establishment of a body equivalent to the three separate accident investigation branches that cover marine, aviation and rail, claiming police investigations are too focused on criminal procedures to fully consider safety ramifications.
Despite dramatic improvements in road safety and a long-term decline in vehicle-related accidents, road deaths far outstrip those seen for planes, trains and boats. In the last 11 years there were 494 deaths recorded for aviation, rail and maritime accidents in the UK or surrounding waters and airspace, compared to more than 36,000 deaths on Britain's roads.
Professor Stephen Glaister, director of the RAC Foundation, which focuses on policy and research, said there was a need for greater emphasis on road accident prevention, rather than punishment.
"Historically, road accidents are analysed by individual police forces with the emphasis placed on finding out if anyone has broken the law," he said.
"Identifying the underlying causes of crashes seems to be of secondary importance. We've been locking up drivers for a century, yet motorists still die in their thousands on the roads each year.
"The focus on penalising individuals rather than also identifying systemic safety failings is a serious flaw in current transport policy.
"Road safety should be driven by prevention as well as punishment."
The foundation's report - Transport Safety: Is The Law An Ass? - was written by Chris Elliott, a systems engineer and barrister who has specialised in transport and safety. It highlights issues he claims are not always picked up by police investigations.
In one instance, a family of six was killed when a truck ran into their stationary car on the M6 in 2008; while the police investigation found the truck driver was responsible for a lapse of judgement, for which he was given a three-year custodial sentence, there was no consideration of why stationary traffic was there in the first place or what might be done to prevent a similar situation, Mr Elliott claimed.
Neil Greig, policy and research director at the Institute of Advanced Motorists, agreed that a road accident investigation body could provide greater insight into the causes of accidents. He said: "With modern investigation techniques, crash investigators using computer programmes may find different things to what first appeared,"
But specialist investigations would be hampered by the need to re-open roads and a shortage of available experts, Mr Greig cautioned. "The real question is what you do with the data and how much you spend on things like road improvements," he added.
The RACF's findings were dismissed by the Department for Transport, which said a separate road accident investigation branch would "duplicate" the work of the police.
A spokeswoman added: "All fatal collisions on Britain's roads are investigated in detail by expert police accident investigators.
"Their findings are fed into a national database which helps us to improve our understanding of what actually causes these collisions and allows us to take possible measures to prevent further deaths on the roads.
"This work is supplemented by detailed analysis of specific cases by road safety researchers and we see no case to duplicate this effort."
The Scottish Government, which is finalising a new 10-year road safety framework, also claimed that police investigations adequately informed accident prevention strategies.
