Question to the Department for Transport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, what steps his Department is taking to ensure that the laws relating to traffic offences are effectively enforced.

The responsibility for the enforcement of criminal law, including traffic offences, is a matter for the Police who work under Home Office guidance. Decisions on how the Police deploy resources is a matter for the Police and Crime Commissioners and the Chief Constables for each police force.

The detailed statistics on prosecutions and convictions for motoring offences between 2010 and 2017 have been fairly stable. However there has been an increase in Police using education courses under the National Driver Offender Retraining Scheme (NDORS) from 467,601 courses in 2010 to 1,445,817 in 2018.

The National Speed Awareness Course impact evaluation, published in 2017, found that participation in the course was more effective at preventing speed reoffending than fines and penalty points over a period of 3 years following the initial offer to attend. The National Speed Awareness Course is now offered by most police forces in England and Wales.

In March 2018, we provided a grant of £370,000 to PACTS (Parliamentary Advisory Council for Transport Safety) to run a competition to encourage the development of mobile evidential breath testing instruments which will meet the Home Office type approval requirements. Phase 2 of this competition closes at the end of June 2019.

The DfT has recently invested £100,000 to support the digital capacity of the police to enable them to handle dash and helmet cam evidence in respect of road traffic offences.