By Steve Gooding, Director, RAC Foundation
If a week is a long time in politics then what price two years? It is now over 26 months since the then roads Minister, Baroness Vere, announced in June 2022 the Government’s intention to establish a Road Safety Investigation Branch, saying:
“The UK may have some of the safest roads in the world, but tragedies still happen and any injury or death on our road network is one too many. That’s why we’re establishing the Road Safety Investigation Branch, so we can boost safety for road users even further and also bring safety measures in line with other modes of transport and the future of travel.”
Rarely does a minister get to make a statement that’s greeted with such widespread approval. At the time, the Department for Transport expected to include measures to enable the creation of the branch in “the forthcoming Transport Bill”, but then, to cite another political expression, that Bill fell victim to “events”. In political turmoil following the Prime Minister’s decision to resign in July 2022, the only relevant provisions from that Bill were those salvaged to form part of the Automated Vehicles Act, and, unsurprisingly, were applied solely to automated vehicles.
For the RAC Foundation this was a moment like – spoiler alert – Gareth Southgate’s infamous Euro 96 penalty kick: hopes raised sky high and then dashed in a moment. Except in this case it was as if the goalie had chosen to stroll off the pitch and Gareth had lofted the ball over the crossbar. Because there but for the sake of a few extra clauses in a 100-clause Bill went a golden opportunity.
Why bother you with these tales of times gone by?
The relevance is that Gareth Southgate has been in the news this Summer for his decision to stand down, now recognised as one of the great England team managers, fully recovered from the ignominy of that match. And this Summer we have high hopes that the new Government of 2024 will come back to the proposal to create a Road Safety Investigation Branch and make this a key part of the fresh new road safety strategy they have promised.
Back in 2022 the conclusion that we reached in our report[1] on the business case for creating an independent investigation body for road collisions was that the case was positive and that such a body should be established. We stand by that conclusion.
We argued then, and would argue now, that while many people are involved in investigating road crashes there remains a gap in the learning cycle for roads that has been addressed for other safety critical industries. That’s because the most thorough road crash investigations undertaken today are by the police when fatalities are involved and these are quite properly focused on blame – whether there is a case for prosecution – rather than cause – whether measures could be put in place to prevent a repeat occurrence. To address ‘cause’ the accident investigation branches for air, maritime and rail all enjoy important legal protections that enable them to pose and get answers to the right questions and to access and interrogate the right material.
Of course a road-focused branch would need to be shaped to deal with the specific circumstances that apply to road traffic in this country, not least the significantly greater volume of incidents compared to air, sea and rail. It would need the capability to handle individual large scale or complex road collisions, and could sensibly include those involving vehicles operating under high levels of automation (in accordance with the Law Commissions’ recommendations). We think it should have an organisational and operational bias toward thematic investigations, harvesting data from multiple sources and looking for patterns across the road network as a whole to create a broad, rich picture, deep-diving into individual incidents as part of that, rather than as stand-alone exercises. And it would need to be forward-looking, alive to emerging patterns of risk arising from changes in our use of the road network.
As the 2024-25 football season gets underway we’re proud to be one of a myriad organisations who support the PACTS four priorities for improving road safety, including the creation of a road safety investigation unit – it’s time to get this one firmly in the back of the net.
[1] https://www.racfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/Gooding-Box-2022-Road-Collision-Investigation-Project-RCIP_Final-project-report_June.pdf
Steve Gooding is the Director of the RAC Foundation