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Christopher Booker's Notebook:
Slowly the facts about speed emerge
'We're here to save lives." No one can use Bath station without seeing this slogan blazoned everywhere over the floors, advertising something called the Avon & Somerset Safety Camera Partnership. A year ago I reported here on attending one of its "Speed Camera Workshops". The message dinned into us for three hours was that "speed" is responsible for a third of all traffic accidents; that the definition of "speeding" is breaking a speed limit; and that, therefore, by stopping drivers speeding, speed cameras were saving large numbers of lives.
Fortunately, thanks to a detailed brief from Paul Smith, the road safety expert who runs
www.safespeed.org.uk, I was able to show how every single statistic used to support this case was wrong. And now the Department for Transport (DfT) has finally published new figures that support Mr Smith, and show that the number of accidents involving motorists breaking a speed limit is only 5 per cent.
Mr Smith's general point is that, for 30 years, Britain enjoyed the safest roads in Europe, with road accident figures in continuous decline. Only in 1994 did that rate of decline markedly diminish, when the government put speed cameras at the centre of its road safety policy. This, he argues, was a disastrous misjudgment, only justified by massaging the statistics, which the DfT has at last done something to rectify.
But telling the truth is not a habit the DfT will take to readily. The same report also boasted that the UK is well on course to meet its target of a 40 per cent drop in serious accidents by 2010. What the DfT didn't tell us was that this target was set by the EU – now moving rapidly to take control of road safety policy – and that actual accident figures, as reported by hospitals, show no drop at all. In other words, the DfT is now telling lies not just to fool the rest of us but the EU as well.
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