Any organisation that deals with the awful consequences of road accidents probably has something important to contribute to prevention. This involves many very different organisations: for instance the police in their enforcement role, or schools and colleges where everyone would be affected by the death or injury of a fellow student. Council officers and members and the police are well established in tackling road safety. Fire and rescue services, the health service, crime and disorder reduction partnerships and other agencies will also find pages tailored to them on this website. It's important to get the best from all their potential contributions.
Outside councils there are few full-time road safety specialists. So, councils should take a lead, and encourage other local organisations to address road safety as part of their work. Even sharing information and intelligence is important, helping to target risky behaviour on the road.
Much of the time people go about their day-to-day lives without thinking about the risk of a road accident. However, people are often concerned about quality of life issues which have a road safety angle. These issues include:
- making the street where they live quieter and more pleasant
- taking action against anti-social behaviour
- starting a family
- making choices about how to make regular journeys, to and from work, at work, to and from school
The services that people access in their day-to-day lives may be able to put the road safety message across.
Arrangements for joint working
Collaboration doesn't happen unless officers and staff from the different organisations have good working-level relationships. But our report argues that this level is not enough. The greatest benefit comes from partnership arrangements; these can be relatively informal, or more established.
At the more formal end of the spectrum, the government encourages local bodies to work together through local strategic partnerships. The proposals in the 2006 Local Government White Paper would strengthen this role. Although the White Paper hardly mentions road safety, the principle could raise the profile of joint working in road safety.
Some safety camera partnerships will be broadening their road safety activities after April 2007. Working as a formal partnership with this expanded remit brings challenges as well as opportunities.
Four challenges
If local organisations are to coordinate road safety work, they need to answer these four sets of questions:
- Agreeing what needs to be done - do you have a shared view of the priorities for your area? Do you make sure that the 3 Es - engineering, education and enforcement - reinforce each other? If not, are your activities having the impact that they might?
- Deciding who does what - who is best placed to work with for example disaffected young people, or older drivers?
- Sharing information and intelligence - data collected by the police at road traffic accidents (STATS 19) is a vital information source; the question - covered on the police pages of this site - is how to improve its quality further. Other organisations have data too. Our health pages describe how NHS data, anonymised and summarised, could add valuable information. Could your organisation feed back useful information about the risks that people run and the causes of collisions? Bringing all this information together could lead to a fuller understanding of how to reduce the numbers of people killed and injured on the road.
- Funding - are different organisations sharing financial resources and staff, equipment and facilities to ensure that money is spent where it is most effective?