A minister responsible for road safety has abandoned her support for a law targeting dangerous young drivers after joining government, The Independent has learned.
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 Sir Keir Starmer appointed her minister for the future of roads following the general election, Ms Greenwood said she was not considering introducing the scheme – without explaining why she had 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.
“The collision involving three teenagers killed in a crash in Wakefield on Friday night just brings home the urgency of why action is required.”
Dr Ian Greenwood, who began campaigning for road safety after his 12-year-old daughter Alice was killed in 2008 in a collision involving a young driver, said: “Too many people are killed from young driver crashes, and whilst I am disappointed the government have said they are not currently considering GDL, we will continue to fight for action to help young drivers to avoid injury crashes.”
Last year, Dr Greenwood was personally thanked by Ms Greenwood, who is no relation, for his campaigning after she joined Kim Leadbeater and a handful of other Labour MPs in presenting the GDL bill to the Commons in a 10-minute rule debate.
“No one has done more to push this onto the UK political agenda than [Dr Greenwood],” Ms Greenwood, then an opposition backbencher, tweeted.
On 9 May, two days after the bill’s first reading in the Commons, she tweeted: “Proud to be a supporter of [Ms Leadbeater’s] Bill. There is good evidence that GDL could save lives and it deserves proper consideration by government.”
But on 28 November, when asked by Labour backbencher Dr Scott Arthur if she would assess the merits of GDL, Ms Greenwood, by then a minister since July, said: “We are not considering Graduated Driving Licences.”
The GDL bill’s passage through the Commons was halted when parliament dissolved for the general election called by Rishi Sunak on 22 May. No attempts to introduce a similar bill have been made since.
The Department for Transport (DfT) is working on a road safety strategy and Ms Greenwood said ministers are considering other measures to improve young driver safety.
Campaigner Sharron Huddleston’s 18-year-old daughter Caitlin died as a passenger in a car with three young women travelling for an evening meal on a wet rural road. Ms Huddleston has campaigned for safer roads ever since and founded the Forget Me Not Families – a group of 198 bereaved family members who are pushing for GDL in Britain.
She said: “We must have action from government as soon as possible to stop these needless preventable road deaths. This is a public health issue.”
Ms Huddleston and other members of the Forget Me Not Families will take part in a Westminster Hall debate on road safety for young drivers on Tuesday.
A DfT spokesperson said: “Every death on our roads is a tragedy and our thoughts remain with the families of everyone who has lost a loved one in this way.
“We absolutely recognise that young people are disproportionately victims of tragic incidents on our roads, and we are exploring options to tackle the root causes of this without unfairly penalising young drivers.
“The roads minister recently met with the family of a young person killed on our roads, and continues to engage with those affected to help better inform our efforts to tackle this problem and protect young drivers.”
