(1 day, 20 hours ago)
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Baroness Crawley
To ask His Majesty’s Government what plans they have to create a national accident prevention strategy, as set out in the report by the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents, Safer Lives, Stronger Nation: Our Call for a National Accident Prevention Strategy, published November 2024.
Baroness Crawley (Lab)
I begin by thanking noble Lords for taking part this afternoon. It is really appreciated.
I was recently asked to be a vice-president of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents, RoSPA. I am delighted to see my noble friend Lord Jordan here, as he is the lifetime president of that same organisation. There you are—forever young.
This is a body that has been at the forefront of accident prevention for more than 100 years, with landmark campaigns leading fairly directly to legislation, from its campaigns in 1917 for pedestrians to face oncoming traffic through to the Highway Code and the Green Cross Code, cycling proficiency and compulsory seatbelts in 1981—gosh, it seems so long ago now—as well as banning hand-held mobile phones while driving, up to the report in front of us today. Imagine the entire O2 arena, with all 2,000 seats filled; now imagine that crowd wiped out, not once but every single year. That is how many lives we estimate we lose in the UK to accidents. These are not rare events; they happen every day in our homes, on our roads, and in our workplaces and communities.
The Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents reports accidental death rates surging by 42% over the past decade. It was that figure that led me to think that we need a wider parliamentary debate about this. This is not just a statistic, it is a crisis: a national failure of co-ordination, leadership and investment. I say to my noble friend the Minister, whom I respect greatly, that we really need government to champion a national co-ordinated approach to accident prevention, because the current system is just not working.
As the Minister will know, responsibility for accident prevention is currently fragmented across multiple departments: Health, Transport, Education, Housing and so on. This fragmentation leads to gaps, duplication and missed opportunities. There is a chart in RoSPA’s report, of which there are copies on the back table for anyone who wants to have a look, of the overview of government departments and agencies responsible for accident prevention, and it looks like the web of a crazed and demented spider. I would bet that no one in this Room could make head or tail of it.
I believe, too, that accident prevention aligns directly with this Government’s priorities. The NHS 10-year plan, Fit for the Future, for instance, rightly focuses on prevention and early intervention—but injury prevention must be part of that, and part of the vision of that policy, and I am not convinced that it is. Reducing unintentional injuries will lower emergency admissions, free up NHS capacity and improve population health outcomes.
We also know that accidents disproportionately affect people from more deprived backgrounds, making them a clear example of the health inequalities that the NHS 10-year plan sets out to tackle. RoSPA calculates that the cost to the NHS of treating accidents is nearly equivalent to the cost of treating obesity, and twice the cost of treating conditions related to smoking.
The Get Britain Working White Paper that the Minister will be very familiar with identified 2.8 million people out of work due to long-term sickness. Many of these cases stem from preventable injuries. A more co-ordinated approach in government to health and employment accident prevention will keep more people healthy and in work. It will reduce benefit dependency and ensure that local authorities are more financially supported in designing safer communities.
Of course, we have the Employment Rights Bill going through the House of Lords at the moment. It offers a real opportunity to improve workplace safety. Day-one sick pay rights will reduce presenteeism and injury risk. The new fair work agency will enforce safe working conditions and whistleblower protections.
As well as the opportunities inherent in the Government’s agenda, there are also opportunities for getting better co-ordinated data into the area of accident prevention. At present, data is siloed, inconsistent and incomplete. Without robust data, we cannot target interventions, measure impact or hold systems to account. Australia’s national injury surveillance unit shows what is possible and it is a good example for us. It would make sense for the Government to encourage standardised reporting across the four nations. At the moment, we cannot compare data across England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. We should invest in real-time data infrastructure, as well as having an annual injury report published.
RoSPA’s headline call to government is for a national accident prevention strategy led by a named Minister, perhaps a departmental Minister who already has a portfolio, or a Cabinet Office Minister. I would like to put a few questions to my noble friend the Minister before I close. Does she agree with a named Minister heading up co-ordination? Does she think this is an area for co-ordination of data across the four nations of the UK? What provisions in the NHS 10-year plan actually address accident prevention? Can the Get Britain Working reforms be levered to reduce injury-related worklessness? Does she agree with empowerment through education, embedding accident prevention across the whole life course, from early years to old age, in schools, workplaces and communities?
I will leave noble Lords with RoSPA’s current costings for serious accidents. I found it slightly unbelievable when I first read it. Having had a deeper dive, with the help of the RoSPA team, who are sitting at the back, I understand that it is probably a conservative estimate. It estimates £12 billion as the annual cost of accidents, which is evenly split between the cost to the NHS and the cost to businesses.
Around £6 billion is attributed to NHS treatment costs, based on hospital bed days and A&E attendances, and the remaining £6 billion reflects lost productivity, calculated from working days lost due to injury, post-discharge recovery and time taken off by carers, adjusted to include the wider business impact of staff absence. For an economy in search of growth and a population in search of answers to needless and rising injury and death, this needs serious investigation.
Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)
I congratulate the noble Baroness on bringing forward this debate. It really is about time, because this issue comes in, goes out again and somehow is never really fixed or sorted. I declare an interest as the president of the Road Danger Reduction Forum.
The one problem I have with the accident prevention strategy—I apologise to the RoSPA team, its president and its vice-president—is that we should never use the word “accident”, because accidents very rarely happen. There is almost always a cause. It is a problem with roads, vehicles or drivers. Survivors who have suffered road traffic crashes or collisions find it very difficult to stomach the fact that they are called accidents. An accident is something where you say, “Oops, I’m so sorry that happened. I didn’t mean it”. Actually, often these incidents are utterly preventable, so when we are talking about traffic, collisions and injuries, which are incredibly serious and a blight on society, we should really not be saying that they are unavoidable, which is almost what “accident” suggests.
I have been working on this issue for 25 years. When I was in the London Assembly, when Ken Livingstone was mayor, we worked very hard to reduce the number of deaths and injuries on London’s roads. By and large, we did a very good job. It is about joined-up thinking. As the noble Baroness said, this has to cut through all departments and be a common language, so that it is possible to make progress.
I got the Met Police to stop using the word “accident”. Now the Met and some other police forces do not talk about “road traffic accidents”, as they used to, but “road traffic collisions”, RTCs. This is a direct result of the work we did in London on road deaths and injuries. I often say “crash”. I was a victim of two crashes as a cyclist. The first time, on a zebra crossing, I got knocked off my bike across the middle of the road, past all the signs, and landed on my wrist. I still have a very impressive scar from that. The second time, less than a year later, I got knocked off by a cyclist and got only a black eye, so that was good. I went on “Newsnight” that night, and they had to put huge amounts of make-up on my face and film me only from one side.
When looking at these collisions, deaths and injuries, we have to look at multiple things. It can be the design of the roads or a lack of police enforcement, which comes and goes. When I was working on this in the London Assembly, we made sure that the road traffic element of the Met Police was very active and supported. Every year, people talked about cutting its budget, but we managed to stop those cuts. Crashes can also be the result of badly maintained HGVs, a lack of segregated and safe cycle paths, drugs, drink or inattention. All these things are factors, and we have to be clear that you have to tackle them in different ways and with a joined-up approach.
I was the Mayor of London’s road safety ambassador for seven years. It was a bit of a joke title at first; Ken gave it to me because he thought that I would not do much with it, I think, but actually we were very successful. In those seven years, we saw a big decline in the number of injuries and casualties on our roads. Some of that was due to the introduction of 20 mph zones, which had quite a big impact in terms of traffic calming and people being aware of the fact that cars really ought to drive more slowly and more carefully—this happened across London—and some of it was due to the extra resources for the traffic police, which was a very important component of driving down deaths and injuries.
My point is that it took political will but also money and, to some extent, research to understand how these things happen. The car lobby often did not like the things that we did, but the fact is that it worked, and people could see that it worked. The 20 mph zones became fairly well accepted in London, and segregated cycle lanes worked and made people a lot happier. The measures reduced the number of people who were killed or injured, obviously, but they also reduced the number of grieving family members and partners who had to face the fact that their loved ones were dead and gone or might never be the same again—that is, they might never walk or speak again. As the noble Baroness, Lady Crawley, said earlier, they also reduced the costs to the NHS and the care system of looking after thousands of people with life-changing injuries; on a national scale, that is absolutely huge. So, having an accident prevention strategy is worth while, but only if departments are willing both to put resources and safeguards in place, in order to make things happen, and to work together; that is a really important part of it.
On health inequalities, the poorer you are, the more likely you are to live next to a large, dirty road such as the M25, which, of course, gives you not just a huge amount of traffic and air pollution but danger.
The Labour Government are right to keep repeating that prevention is better than cure, but I am not sure that they recognise just how much that involves challenging vested interests. I know that this is not easy, whether it is the car lobby whingeing about the police doing something on our lawless roads; the development industry taking shortcuts with the regulations around fire safety; or people drinking or taking drugs and then driving, thinking that the police have better things to do. For me, it is hard to think of anything better that you can do with your time—particularly for politicians—than prevent deaths and injuries. The well-being of the people has to be our first job. So I hope that Ministers will adopt this call for a crash prevention strategy, but I also hope that they will learn the big lesson from Grenfell Tower and our lawless roads: you have to face down vested interests in order to save lives and progress this agenda.
I very much support the asks from the noble Baroness, Lady Crawley, for a named Minister and to co-ordinate the national data. In the NHS 10-year plan, where do road crash victims come in? I do not know much about the Get Britain Working reforms; they sound okay. Of course, education from primary school onwards is absolutely crucial. I would be happy to be the Minister named to do this job for the Government, because I am very well qualified and I am sure that I could get on with the whole Labour Government.
Lord Jordan (Lab)
My Lords, it is a privilege to follow the powerful remarks—we have a problem; it sounds as though my mic is reverberating—of my noble friend Lady Crawley. She laid out the scale of the challenge that we face in accident prevention. I will not repeat her words, but I hope to try to reinforce them. The astronomical costs to the nation of the rising toll of accidental deaths and injuries, as well as the unacceptable costs to every person or family whose lives are ended or wrecked by accidents, should shake any Government into saying, “Enough is enough”—but they do not and they have not.
This crisis has been 20 years in the making, but it has to be faced up to now. Yes, the solution is challenging, but if Labour’s manifesto commitment to
“embed a greater focus on prevention throughout the entire healthcare system”
is to be realised, it must be acted on where it is most needed, and nowhere is it more starkly needed than in the prevention of accidents. It can be done; it has been done before—and by a Labour Government.
The Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 was a turning point in a long and deadly history of industrial accidents. Since its introduction, workplace fatalities have fallen by nearly 80% and non-fatal injuries have been more than halved. These are not just statistics; they are proof that accidents can be prevented by life-saving laws. As a result of the success of the 1974 Act, the centre of gravity in the world of accidents shifted from the workplace to the home and from factory and building workers to vulnerable ordinary people who spend most of their time confined to their house. Statistically, the home is now one of the most dangerous places to be in the UK.
When the 10-year National Health Service plan came out, RoSPA expected—indeed, hoped—that it would seriously address the needs of one of the NHS’s biggest customers: accident victims. But it does not; in fact, the document is virtually an accident-free zone. In Fit for the Future, Wes Streeting has an afterword: “Be the Change”. I say to him and the Labour Government: make a national accident prevention strategy the afterword and RoSPA’s Safer Lives, Stronger Nation report the formula for radical and proven life-saving change.
RoSPA and other safety organisations want to play their part in delivering such a strategy. We know the world of safety; we know what works. For over a century, we have been delivering accident prevention and, after decades of research, trials and pilots, we know that education, engineering and enforcement can and must work together. We also know that Governments have had the means to make a difference to the chronic and appalling problem of accidental death and injury. But, in politics, leadership is everything, and on this issue it has been lacking for 40 years.
I spent more than 20 years of my working life on the shop floor in manufacturing. That was time enough to see accidents up close and ugly, traumatic enough to make my first representative job that of safety shop steward, deep-lasting enough to make me later join Britain’s oldest and most effective safety organisation, RoSPA, and experience enough to know that the 10-year National Health Service plan presents a real opportunity for Labour. It can change the depressing recent history of increasing accidents that target in particular the elderly, the very young and the most disadvantaged people. The Labour Government now need to send out a clear signal to the whole country not only of intent but of priority that there will be a national accident prevention strategy and that a Minister will lead it. That sort of leadership will tell the British people they now have a Government who will treat the colossal cost of accidents, in lives and resources, with the urgency it deserves.
Viscount Younger of Leckie (Con)
My Lords, I, too, thank the noble Baroness, Lady Crawley, for securing this important debate. She is rightly concerned about the importance of ensuring that people’s safety should be considered, managed and overseen, not just locally but nationally, and that more should be done by government. The debate takes me back to various jobs that I held in the 1980s, when I worked in personnel in various woollen mills around the country. As the Committee can imagine, health and safety was a key part of that responsibility, on the back of the Health and Safety at Work etc Act 1974, as the noble Lord, Lord Jordan, said.
Accident prevention should be a key facet at the heart of our regulatory system and considered to be an integral feature of so many aspects of the way in which we lead our lives, at home and in the workplace. Rather like an insurance policy, we should always seek to minimise the risks. We should also take greater account of how our lives are changing—and I will say more about this later. Safety should be constantly and continuously considered in the manufacturing, purchase and use of products that we use every day, including those imported from abroad. In this respect, to what extent are imported goods regularly inspected and monitored and standards upheld? That is my first question to the Minister.
I turn to the report itself and the findings by RoSPA. As has been said, the results are worrying—and rather astonishing. First, as has been said by other noble Lords, you are substantially more likely to suffer a serious accident today than you were 20 years ago. As the noble Baroness, Lady Crawley, said, accidents take 20,000 lives each year. In England, as she mentioned, in the past decade, the accidental death rate increased by 42%. I add to that by saying that in Scotland, it was up by 57%, and in Wales, by 41%.
Last year, 7 million people attended A&E departments following accident-related issues. We always hear anecdotes circulating of the type of surprising and unusual accidents which befall people. As the noble Baroness said, the cost to the nation was £12 billion, of which £6 billion was a direct cost to the NHS in medical care, but not including ambulance callouts, and she went on to give some more granular details on that. Therefore, we can understand the scale of the diversion of NHS resources from other, non-preventable areas of the health system—something worth reflecting on.
As I said, these statistics are alarming, and we could surmise the reasons which, at first sight, seem counterintuitive, because we might assume that society makes progress, and does it not follow that we learn to look after ourselves better, mitigate risk and that government, over time, improves its regulations and oversight of accident prevention in all aspects of society? The reason for some of these sombre statistics could be construed as a result of a variety of changes in our lives. For example, the greater number of people living longer, and so the greater number of older people, means a greater number of accidents in that cohort. We should note that falls are up by 90% over the past decade and represent 46% of all accidents. It is interesting that poisonings, which represent 26% of all accidents, are up by 96%. This will, of course, give conspiracy theorists a field day, but the serious question for the Minister is: can she enlighten us as to the reason? Could it be to do with pills or greater mental health issues? It is that sort of question that I am seeking an answer to.
There are far more cycle lanes, and we keep reading about the tragic accidents that happen, often very high profile, too many involving cyclists and refuse lorries, or pedestrians killed or injured by cyclists. I am sorry to hear of the preventable accident—let us call it an “incident”—suffered by the noble Baroness, Lady Jones. Having said that, transport accidents represent only 7% of accidents and are down 17% in the past two decades.
Despite the publicity arising from these terrifying traffic accidents giving the impression of worse figures here, could these better statistics be due to improved car design, including in-car electronic systems, or all-pervasive traffic calmers and/or the sometimes iniquitous 20 mph limits? Who knows?
As the noble Lord, Lord Jordan, said, it is interesting to note that over half the accidents happen at home and it may be that the majority are related to falls—which goes back to the point about the correlation with the elderly. Why, as I assume is the case, are homes more dangerous than they were in the past? Perhaps the Minister might comment on that.
Moving forward, it is essential for us to redouble efforts to address the issue of accident prevention to save more lives and reduce the pressures on our oversubscribed health services. This disparity is a concern and it is essential that the Government put measures in place to understand the causes of these differences, close the gap and improve outcomes for all the regions.
In November last year, RoSPA’s report called on the Government to adopt a national accident prevention strategy. The report highlighted eight recommendations to the Government, calling for improved data sharing and collaboration, for inequalities to be addressed, for a joined-up approach to guide policy-making at national level and for agencies to be empowered.
From this report, we can understand that one of the underlying causes of accidental deaths is the dispersed nature of health and safety regulations between the different agencies. The Health and Safety Executive, within the Department for Work and Pensions, for example, in my view does a tremendous and robust job on regulating health and safety for UK businesses. I say this from personal experience, from my recent time in office in DWP.
However, stark differences are faced by product safety, housing and home safety, and some aspects of road safety and healthcare. This means that more cross-government work is required, with clear responsibilities for safety, notably, I would argue, in the Departments for Work and Pensions, Transport, Housing and Health, to name four. I admit that I have not gone as far as the noble Baroness, Lady Crawley, in terms of her crazed and demented spider’s web, which passed me by.
I conclude with some final questions for the Minister. Can the Government look further into why accidental deaths are higher for some of the regions, particularly Scotland and Northern Ireland? I mentioned Wales as well. What steps will the Government take to reduce the disparities? Will the Government be looking further into the causes of accidental deaths and how to reduce these? What plans do the Government have to respond to the RoSPA report?
Earlier in my speech, I mentioned that our lives are evolving. We are heading into a new era of driverless cars, air taxis, drone deliveries and the extraordinary, much greater use of airspace and the safety risks that come with this, engendering, perhaps, an image of a science fiction movie.
I mentioned also a greater use of robotics in the workplace and in the home environment. Robots are not supposed to go wrong: totally the opposite, they are supposed to be much safer because of all the testing and the integrated sophisticated technology. But how safe are they? We assume that all these modern gadgets have reached their full proof of concept and are not still at the test and learn stage. Surely, these latter points therefore are some of the most compelling reasons for stepping up our oversight on a national basis, and perhaps the Minister can comment on the most important point of my remarks.
Finally, to echo the remarks made by both the noble Baroness, Lady Crawley, and the noble Lord, Lord Jordan, will the Government acknowledge that the pressures faced by the NHS caused by accidental deaths are there? What actions will they take to prevent and reduce the number of deaths caused by accidents, perhaps as part of the 10-year plan? It is one of the few government areas of progress, I would say. There is an emerging strategy here.
The Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Baroness Sherlock) (Lab)
My Lords, I am very grateful to my noble friend Lady Crawley for her powerful introduction to this short decade and to all noble Lords for their contributions. What a lot of expertise there is in the room for a short debate. I have to say that RoSPA has made a very wise choice in bringing my noble friend Lady Crawley on board. It could not have a better advocate, with the possible exception of my other noble friend Lord Jordan, its life president. I do not want to set a competition up here, but really it could not have done better in choosing advocates from this side. I pay tribute to my noble friend Lord Jordan—what an astonishing career he has had in standing up for workers and for safety in the workplace and safety more generally. I really commend him for that.
I also thank the noble Viscount, Lord Younger, for noting the importance of what can be done within the workplace, within HR and from a professional standpoint, and also the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, for her work on road death prevention. Again, we have all learned a lot from that, and we are very glad that she emerged relatively unscathed from her encounters with other traffic. I take the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, about when an accident is not an accident. It is interesting, and I do not know whether it is down to her, but I gather that the Department for Transport also now talks about road traffic “collisions”, not road traffic “accidents”. I think that there probably are some accidents—noble Lords may have seen me shortly after Christmas, returning from the Recess and hobbling around in a moon boot. I think that that was an accident; I like to try to imply that it might have been a snowboarding accident, rather than me slipping on the wet floor of a cottage somewhere in Northumberland while cooking—I think that even things with the best design in the world could not stop someone like me falling over. That has been the case ever since I was a child and probably will not stop now.
The noble Baroness’s bigger point is really important: we should not assume that these things are not preventable. In a sense, that is the whole point of the RoSPA report. It is about trying to prevent what is preventable, which is what we are all here to discuss. The report presents a striking analysis of the scale and impact of accidental injuries and deaths across the UK. My noble friend Lady Crawley talked about accidental deaths rising by 42% over the past decade—21,000 lives were lost in 2022 alone. Her vision of the O2 stadium is really powerful.
Of course, these are not just statistics: every one represents a family member or friend and a future that has been lost. The report highlights the cost of £12 billion a year, as well as the disproportionality—as mentioned by the noble Viscount, Lord Younger and others—among different vulnerable groups, including older people, children or those in areas of deprivation. I assure the Committee that the Government have noted the report’s recommendations. I commend RoSPA for the report; it is an important piece of work and we are looking at it.
We also absolutely recognise the value that strategic leadership can provide in tackling complex cross-cutting issues. We are committed to working across government to ensure that our approach to accident prevention or incident prevention is coherent, proportionate and responsive to the needs of people across the country. That is reflected in one example in the report. It mentions climate change as an emerging risk that will make accident rates worse in the future. The Government are focused on taking a coherent, mission-led approach to address that risk. We are working across regulators and across departments to take co-ordinated action to deliver the legislated 2050 net-zero target.
My noble friend Lady Crawley mentioned the key ask: that there should be a Minister. I am very grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, for volunteering—I shall be sure to pass that along to the Chief Whip. My noble friend will not be surprised to find that I am not in a position today to agree to that proposal, but the Government will continue to reflect on that proposal and on the report as we consider how best to continually improve effective co-ordination across government.
My friends Lady Crawley and Lord Jordan and, I think, the noble Viscount, Lord Younger, asked about the NHS 10-year plan. The Government’s 10-year health plan for England, published earlier this month, is backed by £29 billion of investment and deliberately sets out a strong preventive approach for improving the nation’s health, rooted in social justice and focusing on reducing health inequalities. It outlines a cross-societal approach to prevention, including action on, for example, tobacco, alcohol and air pollution, alongside strengthened screening and vaccination programmes. I acknowledge that it does not focus specifically on accident prevention, which was a point made by my noble friend Lord Jordan, but it does have a core commitment to shift from sickness to prevention. Through the plan, we will see, for example, primary care, pharmacies and community healthcare working together to help people. If they are managing their conditions at home and living independently, the support should be there to help minimise the risk of accidents and other incidents that require hospitalisation.
My noble friend Lady Crawley also mentioned something dear to my heart in the DWP: the Get Britain Working reforms—as she says, I am very familiar with them. I will keep my remarks short on those, otherwise we may be here some time. They are a real move to try to address the various things that get in the way of people working, either on grounds of sickness or disability. There is a series of partnerships with the health service, the Government and local councils, looking at the interface and looking at supporting people back into work or stopping them falling out of work. We have also, for example, asked Sir Charlie Mayfield, the former John Lewis boss, to do a report on employers and what they can do in this space. I will have a look when that comes out to see whether there are things that we could think about and what are the causes that are driving this in the first place. It is a really well-made point and I thank her for it.
However, if we are getting people into workplaces, we want them to be safe workplaces. My noble friend Lord Jordan mentioned the breakthrough of the Health and Safety at Work etc Act 1974. I was very pleased to see RoSPA highlighting the work of the Health and Safety Executive as an example of where accident prevention is working. There is a robust regulatory environment for workplace safety, owned and enforced by HSE, with the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions ultimately accountable to Parliament and for ensuring the HSE performs its duties in accordance with the law. Since the Health and Safety at Work etc Act 1974 was established, annual workplace fatalities have fallen from 651 down to 124 in 2024-25, a reduction of 81%.
My noble friend Lady Crawley and the noble Viscount, Lord Younger, asked about the role of the Government in co-ordinating data use, funding and accountability across sectors. There are some encouraging examples of cross-sector collaboration on accident prevention. The HSE’s 10-year strategy—Protecting People and Places—is a good example. The strategy spans a wide range of areas, including workplace safety, chemical regulation, environmental protection, and the adoption of emerging technologies. All those areas require co-ordinated action across government departments and industry, and the efforts there reflect a broader recognition that many of the risks people face in daily life do not fall neatly within the remit of a single agency or sector.
Similarly, the recent independent review of patient safety across the health and care landscape, which came out earlier this month, highlighted the importance of aligning roles and responsibilities to improve outcomes. It brought together multiple organisations to examine how oversight and accountability can be better co-ordinated to protect patients and the public. Collaboration, data sharing and efficient use of resources are crucial for co-ordination and accountability in accident prevention. We remain committed to working with partners to explore how best to support joined-up action. I take the point my noble friend made about the interoperability of systems between England and devolved regions, and I am happy to take another look at that.
Noble Lords will know that one of the Government’s main means of preventing accidents occurring is through regulation, which protects individuals and the environment from harm and reduces public health risks, as well as safeguarding employees from harm at work and enabling a healthy and productive workforce. It can also uphold standards in building safety—a point alluded to by the noble Baroness, Lady Jones. It is vital, though, that regulation and the actions of regulators are proportionate.
We should regulate, where necessary, allowing space for discretion and responsible behaviour, but the RoSPA report addresses the whole of society and touches on the legislation and regulatory duties of multiple government departments and their regulators. Although it is complex, our current regulatory approach does provide a focus on accident prevention that responds to those multifaceted needs. On the protections provided by that sort of regulatory and policy framework, there might be a complicated diagram, but it does mean that the best-placed organisation takes the lead on specific issues, and that is crucial to our response.
The need for data to inform accident prevention is crucial, and departments are working to improve the collection and use of accident-related data. So, for example, DBT’s Office for Product Safety & Standards works with a range of stakeholders to gather information around incidents that might be linked to product safety issues. That includes fire and rescue services, other regulators, consumer bodies and safety charities, which allows emerging issues and serious incidents to be responded to.
My noble friend Lady Crawley raised the importance of public education in preventing accidents, and I am grateful for and absolutely agree with her highlighting things such as the Green Cross Code—things I think those of us of a certain age will never quite forget, which just shows that campaigns well done stick in the mind. I can still see Tufty, I can still do “Clunk Click”. It is all in there somewhere, even though sometimes I cannot remember where I am meant to be. Those things get in very early on, and we agree that education has a vital role to play in shaping safer behaviours today. The Department for Transport’s THINK! campaign continues to raise awareness of road safety with targeted initiatives such as the Safe Adventures campaign, which helps parents prepare children for independent travel. I commend that to her, and indeed to the Committee.
I turn to the issue of road safety, raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Jones. She made some very important points, and I commend the work of the London Assembly and the work that she did, along with Ken Livingstone, in collaboration or in whatever way—it is extremely important. I reassure her that the Government remain absolutely committed to improving road safety and reducing the number of people killed or seriously injured on our roads. We recognise the importance of continued education but also of enforcement and infrastructure improvements to protect all road users. It is good to see that, between 2000 and 2024, the number of reported road fatalities fell from 3,409 to 1,633, coming down by over half, but we need to keep driving that down. The noble Baroness may be aware that the Department for Transport is currently developing a new road safety strategy that will set out our future direction in this area, and that will be published in due course.
The noble Viscount, Lord Younger, raised the question of monitoring products from abroad. The Office for Product Safety & Standards has established a co-ordinated system of product safety checks at the border, which involves proactive checks on high-risk products as well as working with businesses and supply chains to create sustainable behaviour change. In 2022-23, activity funded by that programme stopped 10 million non-compliant or unsafe products from entering the UK market.
The noble Viscount also asked about the number of poisonings. This is rather less Agatha Christie and slightly more something else. In fact, the RoSPA report attributes the high number of accidental poisonings primarily to drug and alcohol-related incidents, often exacerbated by deprivation. The Government are committed to reducing drug and alcohol-related deaths, and DHSC is currently reviewing its action plan to achieve this.
The noble Viscount mentioned the difference in different parts of the country, which is interesting. Again, the report attributes the higher level of accidental deaths in Scotland and Northern Ireland to a combination of a higher number of transport-related fatalities and socioeconomic deprivation. I do not have much more background to that, but it is an area that it would be interesting to dig into.
The noble Baroness, Lady Jones, touched on building standards and the need to tackle vested interests. Just to reassure her, because she mentioned Grenfell, the Government have accepted all 58 recommendations of the Grenfell Tower Inquiry and are implementing them all. Just to add, the Building Safety Regulator, established under the Building Safety Act 2022, is now operational, and more will be done in that area.
Finally, as I have run out of time and the machine is flashing at me, the Government are not complacent. We recognise the importance of prevention in reducing harm, protecting lives and easing pressure on public services. We also appreciate that the landscape of accident prevention is evolving, as the noble Viscount, Lord Younger, said, with emerging risks coming in—not just climate change but artificial intelligence and autonomous technologies. We may think, as he says, that we get safer and look after ourselves, but maybe we just find new ways in which to damage ourselves and other people. One day, when my promised jetpack finally arrives, I want there to be some system for making sure that I do not hurt myself and other people in the process.
No matter what the challenges are, it is the job of government to make sure that we are ready for them. The RoSPA report is a valuable contribution to the national conversation on safety, and we welcome its insights and ambition. We will continue to work across departments, with local authorities, industry and the voluntary sector, to ensure that our approach to accident prevention is evidence-led, proportionate and responsive to the needs of the country. We are committed to building a safer, healthier and more resilient society.
I thank all noble Lords and RoSPA, as well as all others involved in this work, for the continued contribution that they make.