Meeting of the Parliament 25 March 2014
I am grateful to have been given the chance to contribute to the debate and I rise to support the Government motion and Mark Griffin’s amendment.
I am fairly unique in this debate as, when I was a young man in my teenage years, I was a statistic: I had the success of crashing my parents’ car in darkness on a country road, which nearly saw the end of me. Probably many people wished that that outcome had been delivered, but I am very grateful to have survived, thanks to the support of the police and the accident and emergency unit on the night.
When examining the balance to be struck between the freedom of the individual and the safety of young drivers, we do well to remember the statistics. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development has reported that road traffic accidents are the biggest killer of 15 to 24-year-olds in industrial countries. It has said:
“Driving age young people under 25 make up around one-tenth of the population in OECD countries, but represent more than a quarter of car drivers killed on the road.”
A clear-cut conclusion can be drawn from that: young people are overrepresented in single car and loss-of-control crashes and crashes in which drivers turn across oncoming traffic.
There is a duty on us to protect young drivers from their own inexperience and—as Alex Johnstone said—overconfidence in their ability to drive. In 1998, 17 to 21-year-olds accounted for 7 per cent of the total driving population here, but they comprised 13 per cent of drivers involved in collisions. That statistic reflects the tremendous angst caused to families through not only death but serious injury on the roads, the loss of young people’s talents and futures and the tremendous heartache that families experience over years, decades and probably lifetimes.
In my case, it took more than a year to recover fully from my accident, and I was very fortunate. Other families that I grew up with were less fortunate: in those circumstances, parents and siblings carried the burden of those experiences thereafter.
In 2011, Transport Scotland made a number of recommendations that go alongside the issues that we are debating today. The curriculum for excellence can ensure that there are learning opportunities in school and is an important resource that we should commend to those in schools. They should bear in mind road accidents’ effects on not only young drivers, but pedestrians, cyclists and, indeed, car passengers. There is no doubt that passengers in vehicles with young drivers add to the compound that encourages the kind of behaviour that unfortunately results in accidents. We should encourage better governance and evaluation of interventions so that we know what road safety education works with young people and invest in worthwhile interventions.
It would be churlish not to acknowledge the fall in the number of road accidents and deaths and injuries in the past five years, but I am heartened that the minister shows no evidence of complacency.
As was mentioned earlier, the Association of British Insurers has offered recommendations. Its suggested minimum 12-month learning period seems a sensible way forward, and lowering the driving age from 17 to 16.5 years, perhaps to please young people and assure them that they are being not deprived of driving but encouraged to drive well, would be a good thing. The lowering of the blood alcohol limit is important, too, although the ABI makes no mention of the impact of drugs and their effects on young drivers, particularly at night. In a modern world, unfortunately we need to think about that.
Alex Johnstone mentioned potential difficulties with having different alcohol limits, but I do not think that such a policy would have the practical impact that he suggests. A police officer should not think of doing a blood or breath analysis at the roadside unless there is a genuine suspicion that alcohol is involved.