Question to the Department for Transport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, how much funding his Department has allocated to making road safety improvements intended to help prevent fatal and serious injuries in each of the last three financial years.

Through the Department’s Safer Roads Fund, over the last three financial years Government has invested over £83million in specific infrastructure schemes to make dangerous roads safer, therefore helping to prevent fatal and serious injuries.

In addition, having a well maintained local road network greatly contributes to its safe operation. The Government is spending more than £5.5 billion between 2020 and 2025 into local highways maintenance. This is enough to fill millions of potholes, repair dozens of bridges, and resurface roads up and down the country.

Having a safe Strategic Road Network (SRN) is also extremely important. The majority of the capital investment National Highways spend to improve the SRN will help to improve safety in some capacity. Furthermore, National Highways received £140m during the second Roads Investment Strategy (RIS2) period (2020-2025) for its Safety and Congestion Designated Fund. This fund has a focus on providing specific safety improvements to the network including targeting high-risk roads, accident-cluster areas, and potential suicide-cluster areas. Over the first three years of RIS2 approximately £85 million of this funding has already been invested in improvements.

Road safety is however about more than investment in specific infrastructure schemes, a variety of policy and regulatory actions are at the heart of road safety; examples being taking action on using hand-held mobile phones whilst driving, to the Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency ensuring that the practical driving test continues to allow for an effective assessment of the candidate’s ability to drive safely, to the Driver 2020 research project which has trialled non-legislative measures to help us understand what works best to improve learning and pre-test experiences for young drivers.