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Guest blog: Road safety under attack in London
Tuesday, 09 March 2010 13:24
by Jenny Jones AM, Green Party
Having spent nine years pushing for road safety to be taken seriously by the Met Police, I find that the previous slow incremental improvements are now being reversed with barely a guilty shrug from the Mayor’s office. First, there is a decline of 20 police officers, 5 PCSOs and 5 staff working on road safety. Secondly, cuts to the London Safety Camera Partnership mean the redeployment of 45 police staff, which means it’s a way of letting off 280,000 speeding drivers and red light jumpers who would previously have been sent fines.
What is particularly worrying is that this cutback on enforcing the rules of the road is happening at the same time as the Mayor is promoting trials of the naked streets idea and the removal of traffic lights. As much as I have argued for the removal of pedestrian guard rails, I differ from Boris regarding his description of traffic lights as ‘street clutter’. Naked streets are a brilliant idea if done in the right way, with lots of consultation with vulnerable road users, but a 20mph speed limit is normal in the European towns where they have been trialed. Above all, the overseas culture of driving is different. Dutch towns don’t have tens of thousands of uninsured drivers on their streets and unlike Newham, they don’t have to cope with a quarter of road casualties involving a hit and run driver. The idea that eye contact is enough to slow drivers down doesn’t take into account the illegal nature of many drivers who will simply drive off in the event of a collision.
In the nineteen eighties and nineties, the number of traffic police in London was halved. Some senior people within the Met even discussed closing the unit altogether as the priority switched to electronic enforcement of the roads. Whilst I succeeded in stopping this decline and making road safety one of the Met’s strategic priorities, the long term damage had already been done with an ingrained culture of lawless driving in the capital. The failure to police our roads properly allowed criminals free rein to move around. The safety camera partnership recently released figures showing that three quarters of the drivers they took to court and disqualified for persistant offending were regarded as career criminals by the Met police.
The crossover between uninsured vehicles and mainstream crime is obvious, yet it took the widespread use of ANPR machines in London to show that if you stopped a vehicle with no insurance, or tax, you could often find drugs, weapons and a driver with an outstanding warrant. The Met’s traffic unit has become very effective as a result of this close scrutiny of their work. One estimate shows they make seven times the number of arrests as the borough police. Given the historic decline in their numbers and the proven efficiency of the section, it is one of the last places the Met should be looking to find savings, yet Traffic is now dealing with a 10% budget cut compared to most sections of the Met who have a 5% cut.
At the last meeting of the Metropolitan Police Authority the Commissioner defended his decision to cut traffic police as the right one, as all sections of the Met were being asked to make savings. This simply isn’t true. The public affairs section, for example, has been given around a £1m of extra funding this year. What neither the Mayor, nor the Commissioner, seem to have grasped is that the traffic police are not only dealing with the 5% efficiency savings, but are also having to compensate for the withdrawal of a £1m in TfL funding for the Commercial Vehicle Education Unit. The Mayor has received a lot of criticism from myself, MPs and the cycling community for allowing the closure of this unit which has tried to protect the lives of cyclists and pedestrians by regulating the freight lorry industry. Boris was forced to keep it open and the Met’s traffic unit were asked to set up a new section of 17 officers in total, but without any additional funding.
The Mayor is only partly responsible for the drastic decline in the money for safety cameras in London. It is again TfL who have withdrawn funding, but even they are merely passing on the cut in funding by the Government. In a spectacular failure of political will, the Government has capitulated to the petrol heads within the motoring lobby and withdrawn direct funding across the country. Despite all the evidence that these cameras save lives, most of the existing enforcement in London is being mothballed. According to the unions, it is likely that all 600 wet film cameras will be decommissioned. They will flash, but no one will ever be prosecuted as a result. Both the mayor and the Met are allowing this huge backwards step to happen, for the relatively small saving of £3m.
There are still positives left over from the previous Mayor and the deal I struck over support for Ken Livingstone’s budget. The borough police are taking increasing numbers of uninsured drivers off our local streets. Boroughs like Islington are filling in the gaps by bringing in a 20mph borough speed limit across all their roads. TfL are continuing to pilot speed limiters in London. All these measures will help, but London’s amazing success in reducing casualties over the last decade is now under threat. Road policing is as frontline as it gets. This is the first direct cut to police numbers we have seen and it will have a direct impact on the Met’s enforcement of the law, as well as on avoidable deaths and injuries on our roads.
