Another Labour u-turn?

The Independent reports that a minister responsible for road safety has abandoned her support for a law targeting dangerous young drivers after joining the government.

The paper says that Lilian Greenwood backed a private member’s bill tabled last May calling for Graduated Driver Licensing (GDL), which places restrictions on newly qualified drivers and has been adopted in many countries, but after Keir Starmer appointed her minister for the future of roads following the general election, she said she was not considering introducing the scheme.

Greenwood has not explained, however, why she has dropped a policy she recognised as potentially life-saving a few months earlier:

Campaigners expressed frustration over the shelving of measures they hoped would resemble those in the US, Australia and New Zealand by imposing night-time curfews on new drivers and restricting the numbers of young passengers they can carry.

Supporters of GDL in Britain point to the 4,959 people who were killed or seriously injured in collisions involving young drivers in 2023 (the latest year for which data is available) – around a fifth of the national total. Young drivers (aged 17 to 24) are disproportionately involved in serious collisions at night and when carrying passengers and two-thirds of those involved are men.

The statistics were compounded by a tragic collision near Wakefield on Friday night in which an 18-year-old driver and two of his teenage passengers were killed. Two other men in the car were rushed to hospital, one of whom remained in hospital with life-threatening injuries on Monday.

Several road safety campaign groups have promoted GDL in Britain for years. They have been joined in the past few months by The AA and the National Fire Chiefs Council.

Edmund King, director of The AA Charitable Trust, said: “There are far too many weekends when we hear about carnage on our roads often involving three or four teenagers in a car.

“There is solid evidence from other countries that measures such as restricting the number of peer-age passengers in the cars of new drivers under 21 years of age would save between 20 to 40 per cent casualties of young drivers and passengers. In the UK we believe this could save up to 58 lives per year.

Let's hope that whatever measures Greenwood does bring in are as effective in preventing more young deaths.