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Yesterday I attended an AIRSO meeting, if you haven't heard of AIRSO, it is made up of road safety professionals including members of the armed forces, emergency services, Driving instructors, road safety officers etc, in fact if you are involved in any aspect of road safety it is worth joining. However, this blog is not just a plug for AIRSO, so please keep reading....
What I found disappointing was the conversations I had with a few road safety officers over coffee and lunch. The cuts and how they feared for their jobs was the main topic. We all understand the country has to tighten the purse strings and people will lose their jobs, my fear is the road safety officer will disappear forever.
I have been involved in road safety for over 20 years and the one thing I notice when I attend any gathering of road safety professionals is the lack of new young people. I have become increasingly concerned about the lack of youngsters, but now with the number of people forced to leave the industry due to government cuts, I fear for the future of road safety.
This concerns me because during the last 20 years, we in the road safety community have contributed greatly to reducing death and casualty statistics, which apart from the reduction in human misery has saved the tax payer billions of pounds. In just the last 10 years the number of people killed on the UK roads has fallen from 3450 deaths in the year 2001 to 2222 deaths in the year 2009, a reduction of 1228 fatalities. As it costs the country £1.6 million per road death, you have to ask, is cost cutting and getting rid of our road safety officers and all the other jobs involving road safety going to increase the burden on other budgets? Such as the NHS, police, or Highways Agency.
I may be worrying too much, after all we have the governments 'Big Society' idea and I am sure that will work. Why wouldn't it? Every village could sort out their own accident 'black spots'! You can see it now, a group of well meaning people will raise money for traffic calming to stop speeding drivers using their quiet leafy road as a rat run, solving one problem only to move the problem to a less well off area. Will this result in a two tier road safety with the poorer members of society losing out?
Is this one of the reasons why the Government has currently indicated that casualty reduction targets are unlikely to be a feature of the framework document due to be published shortly? Isn't it amazing how targets are only used when the Government think they can achieve them?
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