For more than a decade, when it comes to the safety of our roads, the UK has been driving blind. In the absence of clear government strategy and the funding to support it, the efforts of committed individuals and organisations have struggled to make headway. Road deaths remained stubbornly static at around five a day, and without a plan, these entirely preventable deaths began to feel inevitable.
The publication of the first Road Safety Strategy since 2011 marks a long-overdue change. For the first time in over a decade, the UK has a clear destination and a sense of how to reach it. With renewed ministerial commitment, clearer accountability and promised legislative change, reducing road deaths feels possible again.
Targets drive action
At the heart of the strategy is a clear evidence-based target and a strong mechanism by which to achieve it. In 2024 1,602 people were killed on Great Britain’s roads and 27,865 were seriously injured. The new strategy proposes to cut this by 65 per cent within the decade, rising to 70 per cent for those under 16.
The strategy adopts a Safe System approach, an internationally recognised model endorsed by the Police Foundation’s Future of Roads Policing report. It starts from the premise that human error is inevitable, but death and serious injury are not. By ensuring that vehicles, infrastructure, speed limits, road user behaviour and post-crash care work together, the system can prevent mistakes from becoming fatal.
Delivery is proposed through a package of measures: better support for road users; greater use of technology, data and innovation; safer vehicles; improved post-collision care; resilient infrastructure; and robust enforcement. Oversight would sit with a new Road Safety Board, chaired by the Minister for Local Transport, which would bring together delivery bodies and departments to provide leadership, monitor progress, remove barriers and draw on international best practice. The proposed Road Safety Investigation Branch is another significant step forward. Using linked police and healthcare data to identify root causes and target interventions, it promises the kind of systemic learning long missing from road safety policy.
“With renewed ministerial commitment, clearer accountability and promised legislative change, reducing road deaths feels possible again.”
Less consultation and more action
The road safety sector has largely welcomed the strategy and the ambition within it. At a recent webinar organised by Project EDWARD to coincide with the launch, the National Police Chief’s Council lead for roads policing, Chief Constable Jo Shiner, praised the dedication of those who had campaigned for this for many years, and the government for finally listening. Similarly Paul Steinberg of the Road Safety Trust said the strategy’s bold targets were “galvanising and daunting” and showed that evidence, when taken seriously, can and should influence policy.
However director of the Transafe Network Saul Jeavons, said that although the targets were “challenging but achievable” there would need to be “less consulting, considering, gathering feedback and more getting on and doing it” if the government is to hope to meet them. Many of the initiatives set out in the strategy, ranging from mandatory eye tests for the over 70s and lower drink driving limits, to compulsory alcohol interlock devices for those convicted of drink driving, rely on lengthy consultations before any changes in legislation can occur.
While past governments may have been asleep at the wheel over the last decade and a half, the sector has not. Over that time experts and academics have created a vast evidence base which shows what works to reduce road deaths. The Police Foundation has been part of this, not least through regular reports and round tables, but also through publishing Roadcraft, the definitive guides for better, safer driving and riding. We already have the evidence, so why not act on it rather than waiting for consultations that will tell us what we already know?
What the strategy means for young drivers
In other cases, the strategy overlooks the evidence entirely – for example when it comes to young drivers. Just before the election, the Police Foundation urged the new government to seriously consider introducing a graduated driving licences (GDL). Young drivers are vulnerable for a wide variety of reasons ranging from lack of experience and developing cognitive skills and attitudes to risky behaviour. The evidence shows legislative changes, such placing short-term restrictions on young and newly qualified drivers can reduce road deaths. Moreover, recent surveys suggest that progressive licences are not the vote loser among young people everyone thinks they are.
Yet, while the strategy clearly recognises the particular risks faced by young drivers, it instead chooses to address them through consulting on a minimum learning period – a requirement that in effect already exists due to persistent test backlogs. It also does not mention other proven incentives, such as expanding access to telematics (“black box”) insurance for young drivers, with reduced premiums for demonstrably safe driving. In doing so, the strategy selectively cites from research that suggests while minimum learning periods can be effective, they are an inferior alternative to graduated licensing. Speaking at the Project EDWARD event, Durham PCC Joy Allen urged campaigners and experts to keep pressing for a GDL, saying that every time she hears of young people killed in a car at night, such as happened in Bolton over the weekend, she wonders if another approach might have saved them.
What the strategy means for roads policing
Perhaps the most significant gap concerns enforcement, around which details are scanty. Many of the proposed reforms will place additional demands on the police, yet roads policing has been hollowed out over recent years, with some forces left with minimal or no dedicated capacity. Stronger drink-driving laws for example are meaningless without officers to enforce them. Yet this strategy is light on how this enforcement might be funded or how roads policing might be restored. Similarly, while the strategy briefly references a Roads Policing Innovation Programme, it offers no detail and makes no mention of initiatives such as Operation Snap – currently being explored in the Police Foundation’s research on digital citizen evidence – which empowers members of the public to share footage showing dangerous and careless driving directly with the police.
We shall have to wait for the long-anticipated Roads Policing Review to know whether we will again have the roads policing capability we need to face the demands of now and the future. In the meantime, the Police Foundation will continue to convene debate, publish evidence and shape thinking on roads policing and how it might make better use of emerging technologies in a changing policing landscape.
After so long without any direction from the centre, the Road Safety Strategy’s publication alone is more than a step in the right direction. But knowing the destination is not the same as reaching it. There are too many unanswered questions on funding, too many consultations to wait for, and too much caution around turning evidence into action for us to know how close we are to a future where no one is killed on the roads.