New law ignores driver training
Road Safety Bill to omit re-education for drivers
The government's Road Safety Bill downplays the importance of driver training and testing. According to the Department of Transport (DoT), it "recognises that better driving skills and better driving behaviour would make an enormous difference in helping to reduce the number of road casualties." However, the result is a concentration on improving "the education environment so that learners have access to a more consistent and better standard of training."
The Bill includes provisions to improve instructor training and to tighten up regulations for instructors, and will add simple vehicle maintenance checks for learners, along with hazard perception tests. The DoT also reckons that new advice on safe driving under the headline ''Drive on!'' encourages the use of refresher courses for older drivers - -that is, those over 50.
In other words, most drivers on the roads are ignored and are presumably deemed not to need further education or refresher courses. Yet the Institute of Advanced Motoring (IAM) has called for improved driver education, as have other motoring bodies, as well many PHers.
SafeSpeed for example "demands an immediate return to the road safety policies and roads policing methods which gave us the safest roads in the world in the first place. A step on the route to our worthy goal is to expose the flaws and the lies on which modern policy changes are founded."
Other provisions in the Bill include:
- Local transport plans
- Child road safety
- Safer routes to school
- Speed management -- heavily covered here already
- Drink-driving
- Penalties update
- Drugs
- Dagerous driving
- Mobile phones
- Work-related road safety
- Pedestrian protection
- Seat belts
- Safer motorcycling
The Bill has completed its second reading (committee stage) in the House of Commons, and is due for report and third reading shortly.
Ist very short sighted indeed not to have these courses - perhaps they are thinking that they will get £120 for first two years und income from the re-tests? (me? cycnical:
or £240 or DIS /Speed Aware fees? 
) But like all their other legislation - poor on thought und content....
Und shoddy workmen always blame their tools - in this case Average Joe Driver....
Current Roads Polcing policy focuses on the 3 E's - Education, Engineering and Enforcement, supposedly in that order. We should be doing much more.
WildCat said:
Ja - so they set targets und an examiner was dismissed from post in Kent for blowing whistle on fact he had to pass incompetetents to reach some government target und suggested that the L-test had gone same way as educational exams in the dumbing down
Now that's very interesting and vindicates all the calls to make the test tougher.
Dumb down and then concentrate on speed. Typical of this government I'm afraid.
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