Transport, Infrastructure and Climate Change Committee

Meeting date: Tuesday, February 22, 2011

Official Report 579KB pdf

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Road Safety (Young Drivers)

Item 3 is a session on road safety and young drivers in which we will hear evidence from the Minister for Transport and Infrastructure, Keith Brown. This is his first appearance in that role at the Transport, Infrastructure and Climate Change Committee, and I welcome him. He is joined by three Scottish Government officials. Jill Mulholland is road safety team leader, Ian Robertson is a policy officer in the road safety team, and Michael McDonnell is director of Road Safety Scotland. I welcome you all to the committee.

In our previous session on road safety and young drivers, I may have given a slightly exaggerated status to what we intended to do. It is unlikely that we will produce a full committee report to the Parliament. However, after hearing evidence, the committee will consider whether and how we want to raise issues with the Scottish Government relating to what we have heard.

Does the minister want to make any opening remarks before we ask questions?

Not on this issue. If you are happy for me to do so, I am happy to go straight to questions.

In that case, I would like to begin by talking about the period since the adoption of the road safety framework, which has been in place for around a year and a half. Can you tell us anything about the trend in the number of collisions involving young drivers? Has there been a noticeable change since the publication of the framework?

Yes, there has. The most recent figures for road casualties in Scotland are from 2009, so we do not have a good picture of what has happened from the time of the adoption of the framework, but road casualties in 2009 were at their lowest level in around 60 years. Despite that, we believe that more should be done, particularly in relation to young drivers. There was a much less pronounced reduction in young driver casualties than there was for other categories of drivers. The figures for both fatal accidents and serious injuries are not falling as fast for young drivers as they are for other categories of drivers. You will know that young drivers are identified as one of the eight national priorities in the framework. Also, to be honest, it is not immediately evident why the decrease has happened—I think that my officials would support that statement. It is not always easy to judge why there has been either a blip upwards, as there was most recently in 2007, or a reduction, as there has been subsequently. Nevertheless, it is true to say that the figures were reducing up to 2009, which was about the time that the framework was launched.

I can talk more about the evidence that we have about young drivers’ behaviours in relation to accidents, but that is all that I can say specifically in answer to your question.

One of the themes to come out in our earlier evidence session was the idea of the framework being a public health measure. In most public health areas, it is often difficult to identify the precise effects of the interventions that are made as opposed to effects in the wider culture and changes that would have taken place anyway. Nevertheless, let us look at a couple of Government initiatives and ask whether you are able to assess their impact or effectiveness. I am thinking of the young drivers debate, which an external organisation was commissioned to run, and the country roads campaign. Can you say anything about those two initiatives? Is it possible to say what has happened as a result of them?

Unfortunately, it is slightly premature in so far as the report on the young drivers debate has not yet been produced. It will be presented at the meeting of the road safety group tomorrow. There has been a good response to that debate—I think that there were 600-plus responses—and more than a third of respondents were young people.

The evidence suggests that the behaviours that contribute most to fatal and serious accidents involving young drivers and their passengers are speeding; driving while impaired through either drink or drugs, which I know that the committee heard a great deal about from its previous set of witnesses; distraction, including from the use of mobile phones; not wearing seat belts; and, crucially, lack of experience. All those issues are addressed in the road safety framework.

As I have said, the debate with young people has been completed. It has given them the opportunity to voice their needs and concerns and to put forward ideas. Most of the area is reserved, but it is evident from the responses that we have received so far that the various measures that might be considered—for example, graduated licences, which we may discuss later—are things that young people feel are restrictive and discriminatory against them. That has tended to be the top line of the debate that we have heard back so far. We will publish the report in mid-March, but it will be presented to the road safety group tomorrow.

Michael McDonnell may want to say something about the country roads initiative.

The country roads initiative was largely ours and was undertaken on the understanding that just over 70 per cent of the fatalities that occur on our roads occur on rural roads. As always, young drivers seem to be overrepresented in those statistics. A lot of research was undertaken before the campaign started, which suggested that the accidents are not to do with commuting but are largely to do with leisure driving—often at weekends, often late at night and often when the driver has friends in the car. It became evident that, when an older person has an accident on a country road, it often results in one fatal or serious injury whereas, when a younger person has an accident on a country road, it often results in more than one fatal or serious injury.

We did quite a lot of work beforehand in order to understand what we should do and the campaign has, so far, been through several phases. The first one identified for the population in Scotland that rural roads are dangerous roads on which to drive. We focused on that because our research showed that there is a complacency—particularly among young drivers—about accidents on rural roads. Rural roads are perceived as being safer to drive on because there is less conflict and less traffic on them. They are places where young people feel that they can relax a wee bit more and test their vehicles, not their driving skills—as far as they are concerned, their driving skills are a given, so they are testing what their car can do. The combination of that and the fact that many of them drive these roads frequently has led to overfamiliarity and to overconfidence, so we must first challenge that. The initial part of the campaign was to identify rural roads as dangerous roads on which to drive—sorry, I should rephrase that: dangerous places for people to be rather than dangerous roads.

The second phase of the campaign was the construction of an advert that showed the problems that distraction can cause to young people in particular. You may have seen the advert. When a passenger opens a can of juice, the driver momentarily looks away and when he looks ahead again a situation has developed that it is too late to do anything about.

Many of our recent adverts have been shot from the driver’s point of view, because one of the problems that we face is young people, in particular, deflecting any message; they think that accidents happen but not to them. We have to try to engage with them and, by showing the scene from the driver’s point of view, we do not identify the gender or the age of the driver, which allows people to see the screen as their windscreen. The distraction advert resonated very well. There were very good results from younger people’s evaluations of the adverts.

We moved on to see how we could address not only younger people but an older audience. We created four adverts that dealt with the unpredictability of country roads, which is something else that had come through from the research. Even though someone might drive on them all the time, they are never the same twice. Familiarity can lead to overconfidence and to people losing control, in particular on left-hand bends, so we constructed a series of adverts that all had the same first 10 seconds, culminating in a driver going round a left-hand bend. Four different scenarios then developed. In the first scenario, the driver skidded but regained control. In the second, he collided with a tractor coming out of a field. In the third, he skidded and crashed into a car coming in the opposite direction. In the fourth, he swerved to avoid a deer and hit a tree. Three out of the four scenarios ending up in a serious accident reflected the fact that, when we started to make the adverts, three out of four fatalities on the roads happened on country roads.

Those adverts have scored very highly in the ad evaluation, which is a tool that is used by the company that looks at our road safety adverts. It takes the evaluation beyond the recall level. Previously, adverts were made and evaluated in terms of recall, but the evaluation now looks not only at people’s recall but at their engagement with the adverts. We are looking to achieve a good motivation score, when people become engaged with the ad so much that they think that the next time they are driving on these roads, they will do something about the way in which they drive.

That is what we have done on country roads to date.

Are there other initiatives or interventions that are either under way now or are being planned or put together that the Government would want to make us aware of?

The convener and the committee will be aware that much of the action that can be taken in this area is reserved. As I mentioned, it is for the Westminster Government, if it chooses to do so, to take forward issues such as graduated licences or whether pass plus is to be included in pre-qualification training for drivers. We have made representations on those issues.

The focus of our attention has been awareness raising and education, which is where we can make an impact. Much that we do will flow from the results of the young drivers debate. That will tell us about some of the things that we will want to take forward. It is worth pointing out the success that there has been. There has been fairly remarkable success in driving the figures down across the piece, not only for young drivers.

If we want to continue to improve, we must ensure that we can properly identify why we have had that success—everybody will, naturally, want to claim credit for it. Given the increase in traffic on the roads, which I think we all acknowledge, to have a reduction to a 60-year low in fatalities is a success. We do not know whether the design of our roads is leading to a reduction in the number of accidents or whether other aspects are helping to reduce the number of accidents, but we think that that is the case; otherwise we would not do it.

Future actions will be determined in large part by Westminster but, where we can identify ways to move forward following the young drivers debate, we will do so. As we did with the road safety group, we will involve young people and get them to engage with that work, because if anything that we do on either education or awareness raising is to be successful, it will require the buy-in of young people.

The initial response that we have seen from the debate is that powerful cars are an issue. I do not want to overstate the position, but young people concede and acknowledge that new drivers being given access to very powerful cars at a young age is something that should be looked at. It is probably regulated more by the insurance market than by anything else, these days. Again, however, we have to rely on Westminster to take that forward. We have to focus on the education side of things.

15:45

I would like to explore a bit further how you assess the effectiveness of your road safety education initiatives. At the previous evidence session, Professor McKenna in particular raised concerns about the lack of effective assessment of previous road safety initiatives. People have said, “We think this works, but we haven’t proved it.”

First, it is worth saying that we believe that the work is effective. If we did not, we would not do it. I think that Professor McKenna also said that it will not work on its own but has to be done in conjunction with other things, and we take the same view.

We conducted research in 2005 that suggested that children who have road safety education from an early age—that includes cycling training, which is prolific in schools—make safer drivers in later life. That research concluded that a developmental track for risky road user behaviour can be traced from very young children to individuals of driving age. Effective early intervention promises a move away from a focus on picking up the pieces when things have happened towards prevention, and the vital contribution of early years education lies in developing and broadening the range of children’s learning experiences so as to equip them for the future.

We see road safety education as a life skill and, as such, it is a vital part of that early learning experience. We believe that it works. The research has been done, although it is now five or six years old, to show the ways in which that education is most effective. However, we are conscious that it will not succeed on its own and that it has to be done in tandem with other things.

Minister, I am concerned that we have that five-year gap. Surely we should be looking for objective-evidence-led investment in road safety initiatives. Your evidence is now quite old, yet you continue to invest in the work. Professor McKenna’s point was that we tend to invest in well-meaning projects rather than ones that have been objectively developed.

It is five or six years since that research was done. The question is how frequently research should be conducted on continuing issues, and a related issue is whether it is best to allocate resources to carry out the functions or to consistently check how effective they are, even when there is a research base. However, that does not change our view that the initiatives work, which is borne out as there have been improvements.

I accept that it is sometimes difficult to say which part of the road safety environment contributes to greater safety—whether it is the design of roads or the education that we carry out with young people. Having just come from an education brief, I certainly believe in the value of education. I think that it makes a difference. We have had some pointers from the research that it makes a difference in particular areas, but to address your point, I think it is worth considering whether we want to look at some additional research. However, that would probably be best done when we have the conclusions of the debate with young people.

That evidence gives us a basic premise for the education work, but all our resources at Road Safety Scotland are based on current evidence. Everything that we do is evidence based, and in turn, everything is then evaluated. In fact, we are the envy of the rest of Great Britain because we have a uniform approach and an evidence-based education system that takes us from the early years—with the baby buggy book and Ziggy’s road safety mission—right through to the end of secondary school. England and Wales do not have that, but we have it in Scotland through Road Safety Scotland. Michael McDonnell can give you more detail than I can on that, because he is director of Road Safety Scotland, which is a Scottish Government organisation.

Frank McKenna was contracted to produce a think piece on education on behalf of the Scottish Government, through Road Safety Scotland. We value interventions from psychologists and other academics, so that we can improve road safety educational resources for our children. Professor McKenna did not aim his remarks particularly at the educational resources that Road Safety Scotland provides; he merely said that, in general, education is not a stand-alone tool, as the minister said, and that other parts of the picture—enforcement and engineering—are needed if there is to be success. We have never advocated education as a stand-alone solution.

Everything that we do is evidence based and is evaluated. As a result of Frank McKenna’s think piece we did additional work on one of our resources. Professor McKenna said that talking a lot about drink driving, for example, can normalise such behaviour and make it more attractive to young drivers. We took his advice and reworked our resource.

Activity is pitched in different ways. People other than the Government who are involved in road safety in Scotland have their own bases for taking forward their activity. For example, the main company that is involved in the M80 work, which is a substantial project, has undertaken quite a lot of safety education, not just on road safety but on the construction works that are going on. It found that there was much higher take-up among primary schools than there was among secondary schools. It was quite hard to engage with secondary schools.

From my children’s experience, I know that some of the very stark messages to senior secondary school pupils seem to work more effectively. In primary schools, messages are delivered through characters—I think that there is a monkey—to make it easy for children to access the information. The point that I am making is that different groups undertake activity on the basis of their evidence, which seems to chime with what we are doing. Our evidence base seems to coincide with the evidence base that others are using.

Has the Government attempted to quantify how many collisions, injuries or deaths have been prevented as a result of particular education initiatives? I appreciate that that is difficult to do.

That is the difficulty. It is hard to know how we would set about doing that research.

The main thing that Frank McKenna said was that there is no direct correlation between education and a reduction in casualties. However, we know that, as a result of education, engineering and enforcement, the figures are going down. It is difficult to evaluate the correlation. What are we comparing against?

We know that things are working and we evaluate the resources that are used in schools to ensure that they are relevant, fit with the curriculum for excellence, have reflection built into them and do the kind of things that behavioural psychologists tell us will get the message across.

Professor McKenna is a well-respected figure in the field of road safety. However, in developing two resources for secondary schools—your call for lower secondary school pupils and crash magnets for upper secondary school pupils—we used equally renowned driver behaviour specialists. We used Professor Steve Stradling, who is a world name in the field, Dr Bill Carcary, Dr Neale Kinnear and Professor Jimmie Thomson, who is head of the psychology department at the University of Strathclyde.

The specialists have been intricately involved in bringing their knowledge not just to the development of the resources but to how we have handled resources after evaluation. We tend to put resources into schools and then wait for two or three years before evaluating them. The crash magnets resource was changed as a result of Frank McKenna’s work to ensure that we are still on target in how it should be pitched and what it should be saying to young people.

Mr McDonnell talked about the ad evaluation and people’s engagement with the most recent adverts. Minister, do you have a view on whether road safety education has only a short-term effect on driver behaviour?

I do not think that that is the case. The 2005 evidence suggests that it has an impact in ways that we do not expect. It is not a mere leap of faith that we pursue education initiatives to try to improve road safety for young drivers. It would be a leap of faith not to pursue such initiatives because we cannot tell how effective they are. Such initiatives are effective in different ways and the effects last a lot longer than a few years.

That is helpful.

What consideration has been given to targeting road safety education at the parents of young drivers, with a view to encouraging and passing on best practice, and to regulating drivers informally, perhaps by providing graduated licensing through the back door, as it were.

As a parent, I can certainly attest to the informal regulation of young people. Jill Mulholland might want to say something about any work that we have done on that.

Road Safety Scotland has developed a resource on that, and we held a seminar for parents. Professor McKenna recommended in his think piece that parents should be heavily involved in road safety education. Road Safety Scotland recognises that parents have an important role to play. We have a booklet specifically for parents that advises them what they can do to help with road safety education for their children when they are thinking about learning to drive and when they start to learn to drive.

I have a copy of the booklet, which I can leave with the committee if you wish. As Jill said, it recognises parents’ role, particularly just after young people have passed the Driving Standards Agency test, when they think that they are invincible and know it all. As a parent of a 17-year-old boy, I am going through that at the moment so I know exactly what it is about.

It is not just drivers. My daughter is 21 and is sitting her test soon—in fact, she is being taught by my brother—but, in my experience, it is when children are younger and get into cars as passengers that concerns first arise. The concern that their child is in someone else’s hands plagues parents’ minds quite a lot. Concerned parents probably do something about that informally, but we do not do anything formally to educate young people about being in cars that they are not driving. I hope that a lot is done to convince young people that they can suffer the consequences of someone else’s bad driving, and that they can guard against such behaviour. Most young people have probably had a frightening experience in a car that they do not want to repeat, and they then put pressure on the young people who are drivers. That is not something that we do, but I think that it is done informally.

I applaud all the initiatives that you have undertaken, but one thing that we do not seem to be talking about yet is the vehicle itself. In a former life, I was in receipt of many vehicles that came back after serious road accidents. In the case of accidents involving young people, one of the characteristics of the vehicle was that it was the second or third car in a family or that it was a much older vehicle, which had been bought cheaply. Ironically, the driver was young but, in order to make transport available to their child, the parents had given them an older, cheaper car.

Technology has moved on and, in my experience, those older cars tended to predate evolving vehicle safety initiatives such as airbags and side impact bars. I wonder whether, in addition to all the education that you are doing, one of the reasons for the reduction in fatalities is the previous Government’s scrappage scheme. Although the scheme was designed to improve the environment, it took a significant number of 10-year-old and older vehicles off the road, to be replaced with newer ones. It is possible that the vehicle stock that people are driving is improving and that, together with the education initiatives, those vehicles are assisting in reducing fatalities because they are—even the older ones—more reliable than vehicles were 10 or 20 years previously.

Intuitively, I would say that that is right. Roads nowadays are designed to a much greater extent than before to try to eliminate accidents. Technological improvements allow us to do that. The same is true of cars. Counterintuitively, though, I would point out that, as I was just saying outside, my first car, which had a starting handle, would have taken four and a half weeks to get up to 60mph. As was the way for many young people, I bought a very old car because it was cheap; indeed, it was so sturdy I imagine that, had it been involved in an accident, it would have damaged whatever it came into contact with rather than suffering any damage itself. Such effects can now be mitigated with crumple zones, for example, but again I point out that issues such as vehicle standards and design are reserved and we cannot get involved with them.

16:00

We now come to the issue that the minister had anticipated—graduated driver licensing, which could restrict new drivers to driving at particular times, in particular locations and with different numbers or types of passengers until they have gained sufficient unsupervised driving experience to cope with a variety of situations. We are well aware that the matter is reserved to Westminster, but does the Scottish Government have a view on the merits of graduated driver licensing?

As has already been pointed out, young people have very particular views about such moves and, indeed, see as unfair any restrictions that would be imposed on a particular section of the population. However, the proposal has come about because of the sense that the accident figures are worse for young people—one in four young people is liable to have an accident in the first year after qualifying. The concerns are legitimate enough to point us in the direction of such an approach, which has worked in other countries. This morning, I was talking to someone from New Zealand, where a similar scheme is in operation.

The matter is indeed reserved to Westminster. However, our road safety framework, which was published in 2009, recognises the strong support for such a move from some members of Scotland’s road safety community. For our part, as I have mentioned, we have fulfilled our commitment to conduct a national debate on young driver safety to discuss ways of addressing the high casualty rates in that group. That debate has allowed us to explore further whether the idea of a graduated licensing scheme is acceptable to and, indeed, has any support from young drivers, their parents and the road safety community. We expect to publish reports from that debate in March.

In the meantime, we are continuing to explore the issue from other angles. For example, the road safety strategic partnership board, on which young people are represented—in fact, I believe that we have extended that representation since the most recent meeting—will meet tomorrow to discuss young driver initiatives and to hear a presentation from Dr Sarah Jones of Cardiff University. It is right that these things happen before we reach any view on a graduated driving licence. I have sensed no urgency in the Westminster Government to deal with the matter; I am not aware of any initiatives that might have been proposed, in any case. However, before we come to a view on something on which Westminster is not intending to legislate any time soon, we want to gather as much evidence as possible and we certainly want to get the results of the debate that we have had with young people.

I accept your reasons for not wanting to come to a view just yet on what is a complex issue. However, I take it that if in due course you come to the view that you support graduated driver licensing, the Scottish Government will consider taking it up as an advocacy issue and lobbying the UK Government to move on it.

We have already indicated our broad support for the principle but have suggested that we explore further its effects. However, as I have said, the UK Government has decided against introducing restrictions on young drivers, although it intends to monitor any evidence that emerges from other countries. In May 2009, my predecessor Stewart Stevenson wrote to the UK Government, expressing our disappointment that it was not going to be more proactive on the matter.

We have expressed some support for the broad principle, but we want to hear what young people have to say. If we conclude that we should push the matter more vehemently, we will do so as an advocate. Obviously, the back-stop is that the Government would always want to be able to deal with these issues in Scotland, but while the issue is reserved to Westminster, we will seek to build an evidence base to see whether there is popular support for such a move and, crucially, whether young people will buy into the idea. After all, as the chap from New Zealand said to me this morning, you can apply all the restrictions you like, but you still have to police them. As we know, policing works best if something has been introduced by consent, so if we can get young people to buy into the proposal in the first place, we will have more chance of success.

In the continued absence of legislation from the UK Government, and taking on board your point about attempting to get young people to buy in, would the Scottish Government consider supporting the development and roll-out of, if you will, an informal graduated driver licensing scheme for new drivers in Scotland, whether it involves partnership with the insurance industry or whatever? Could we take voluntary steps in that direction?

It is possible, but what I have said would still apply. Young people would have to buy into it. Perhaps one way of doing what you suggest would deal with the insurance question as well. These days, many young people simply do not drive because of the cost of insurance, which can often be many times the cost of a car. If a scheme was such that young people felt it gave better access to driving, and they were willing to accept informally the restrictions that you have talked about, and that was all taken on board by the insurance companies so that driving was made more accessible, that might be a way forward. However, we want to have the same evidence base for doing that as we want to have for explicitly supporting a graduated driver scheme.

I am keen to explore that idea further. Professor McKenna talks about the experience paradox and the fact that graduated licences are more commonly used than just in New Zealand. Would you be able to draw on some of the experiences of other countries? I am aware of the variety of those in the United States of America.

What it boils down to is giving people not the freedom to drive but a licence to drive, which gives people the opportunity to use the roads safely. Young people should be educated to know that they do not have the freedom to do what they wish, although if they were licensed in a graduated fashion, they would get more of a chance to achieve that.

That is about education and awareness. When they come to own a car, many young people do not understand why they have to have insurance and what the basis for requiring it is. I include myself in that. Once people have that freedom, or licence, to drive a car, they think that they can just get a car and that will be them. Then they realise all the different responsibilities that they have to insure the car, to ensure that it is roadworthy, to have it taxed and so on. Awareness must be raised of the responsibilities of owning a car. In some places, there is a severe lack of freedom if young people, as well as others, cannot access a car.

I go back to Professor McKenna’s point that road safety education will not work on its own and Rob Gibson’s point about whether we take enough account of international experience. That does happen but perhaps Jill Mulholland or one of the others will know more about that than I do.

One of the reasons why we must be cautious about evidence from other countries is that they have different issues. Obviously, they have different types of roads, but also licensing can happen at a much younger age, particularly in America. That is a different scenario and we want to gather evidence that is appropriate to our country.

Frank McKenna also suggested that graduated licensing could be done through a parental contract with the young driver, so that there would be no need for legislation. That would work only if there is a good relationship between the parent and the young person. Even so, if we look at that type of solution, we can gather evidence on how it works and how it would translate into legislating to capture all young people. We need to be careful about how we gather the evidence and ensure that it is relevant to our situation.

I apologise if I said this the last time I was before the committee, but we must keep at the forefront of our minds the recent evidence from neuroscience. We have to recognise that young people are not the problem: they have the problem. A lot of that is about brain development. The bit of the brain that tells us to be frightened of certain situations is not fully developed in young people. There was a cartoon in The New York Times that showed a jigsaw piece missing out of a young driver’s brain and it asked, “Why do young drivers drive like they have no brain?” and the answer is, “They don’t.”

That is because the frontal lobe does not connect to the amygdala at the back, telling them to be frightened of given situations. That connection does not fully develop until young people are about 25. The introduction of neuroscience into the argument has suggested that we should not demonise young drivers because it is not that they are the problem, but that they have a problem.

The effects of inexperience are about twice as important as the effects of age for new drivers. Therefore, if you adopt some of the schemes that exist in America, you might end up increasing the effects of age while lessening the effects of inexperience.

The important thing is to get drivers through their first, it is suggested, 1,000 miles of solo driving—just them, on their own in the cockpit, making all the decisions for themselves, with no one to lean on in the event of an emergency. Unfortunately, the only way of doing that is to gain experience on the roads and be involved in situations, which we hope will only be near misses as opposed to anything worse. As people develop that experience in their driving career, they will learn from things that they see and do and from things that they do wrong. That is how they will build up the experience that will keep them as safe as the rest of us, if that is any consolation.

The Association of Chief Police Officers in Scotland has said that the police, education departments and other authorities are not necessarily consistent in their approach to road safety education. Does the Government have a view on whether a consistent approach to road safety education should be adopted across Scotland? If you believe that it should, what are you doing to ensure that that happens?

The advice that we give and the materials that we produce are consistent. Of course, given that local authorities have responsibility for education, how road safety education is included in the curriculum is a matter for them and it is not our intention to centralise that. In fact, I would say that the trend is going much more in the direction of enabling or assisting.

We have a responsibility to ensure that we provide the materials, but we do not have a monopoly on the materials that are used. Schools and local authorities can access any materials they want in order to provide road safety education in the way that they want. We enable; we would not insist.

The issue is not just about what is delivered in schools. There might well be consistency in how local authorities approach education in schools, but we are talking about how we can achieve consistency across the police and other organisations.

There should be no bar to doing that.

We acknowledge the fact that young driver interventions, in particular, differ greatly across the country. Road Safety Scotland is providing a modular toolkit for young driver interventions that will have planks that fit in with and reflect the curriculum for excellence. It will provide consistency, as any organisation will be able to use it, which will mean that, across Scotland, there will be the same type of education for young drivers. We already have consistency in schools, because we provide free resources from birth up to secondary school, and we want to extend that a little further, into the stage 2 young-driver interventions. We want consistency but, as the minister said with regard to our other resources, we do not want to box people in or insist that there be some specific event.

That is what we are taking forward across Scotland. Frank McKenna’s think piece formed the basis of the skillset that we are developing.

I am pleased with that response, but it does not answer my question about consistency across the police and other authorities. In each part, people are doing the best that they can. Is there an opportunity to consider best practice in other bodies or for the police to share their plans with colleagues in education and so on? The criticism that we heard was about the lack of consistency across Scotland, not just between education authorities.

16:15

The police are represented on the road safety campaign by one chief constable, which is Kevin Smith of Central Scotland Police, who the member will know. People do talk to each other. Kevin Smith is the representative on a number of different policing and road safety matters and I think that he would say that the police talk to each other regularly. The situation may also develop; you never know, we may get the ultimate consistency if we end up with a single police force.

It is not necessarily wrong for different approaches to be taken, but I take your point that we have to try to identify and spread best practice. I am not convinced that that does not happen at present, despite the evidence that you may have heard. From my discussions with Kevin Smith, I think that best practice is shared, but I will take the point away to find out whether more can be done.

That is helpful, but I remind the minister that ACPOS raised the issue. Clearly, the police have discussed the matter. It would be good to get some feedback.

The Scotland Bill, which is going through its committee stage at the moment, proposes to devolve control over national speed limits and drink drive limits on Scottish roads to the Scottish Government. Would those additional powers allow the Scottish Government to take any new action to help reduce collisions involving young drivers?

One suggestion is for a no-alcohol policy for young drivers. I mentioned earlier that some research has drawn out the fact that impairment while driving is most prominent among young people. It is possible that a differential approach could be taken, despite the problems in doing so. The problems are probably self-evident, including that people of different ages would have to comply with different drink driving law. However, the proposal has been made, so theoretically the situation is possible.

I could not say at this point whether the Scottish Government has a view on the matter. Obviously, we are still going through the Scotland Bill process. There are some inexplicable anomalies in what it is proposed to devolve in relation to speeding that could see someone speeding if they drive a car at 60mph whereas the driver of a car and caravan would be speeding only if they were driving at 70mph. Any future Scottish Government will first have to see exactly which powers are devolved, but the potential is there to tailor things if the Government of the day decided to take action on young drivers.

There are no further questions for the minister and his colleagues on road safety issues. Thank you for answering our questions.