Information about drivers who have been arrested for being under the influence of drugs or alcohol and later convicted for causing death or serious injury, and information about whether an offender convicted for causing death or serious injury was under the influence of drink or drugs at the time of a driving offence is not held centrally and can only be obtained at disproportionate cost.

Data on the number of offenders convicted for drink or drug driving offences, and the specific offence of ‘causing death by careless driving under influence of drink or drugs’ is available in the motoring data tool in the annual criminal justice statistics publication, which can be found at https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/criminal-justice-system-statistics-quarterly-december-2016

Information about drivers who have been arrested for being under the influence of drugs or alcohol and later convicted for causing death or serious injury, and information about whether an offender convicted for causing death or serious injury was under the influence of drink or drugs at the time of a driving offence is not held centrally and can only be obtained at disproportionate cost.

Data on the number of offenders convicted for drink or drug driving offences, and the specific offence of ‘causing death by careless driving under influence of drink or drugs’ is available in the motoring data tool in the annual criminal justice statistics publication, which can be found at https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/criminal-justice-system-statistics-quarterly-december-2016

The amount of goods lifted and moved from (a) Ireland to the UK and (b) the UK to Ireland are provided within the attached table for years 2000 to 2010. Data prior to 2000 are not available. Data for 2011, 2012 and 2013 are scheduled to be published by the end of February 2015.

Best practice measures that can be used to reduce road noise for residents living alongside the strategic road network are set out in the Design Manual for Roads and Bridges HD213/11. Low noise surfacing can be installed on new roads or when replacing existing worn out surfaces. Noise mitigation can be incorporated into the design of new roads by routeing away from properties where practicable and using cuttings and other land forms to act as noise barriers. Noise barriers, made from a wide variety of materials are also used to reduce road noise.

Calculation of Road Traffic Noise (CRTN) provides advice on appropriate road surface corrections to be applied within noise assessments. However, this advice does not currently extend to the range of proprietary thin bituminous surfacing materials, commonly regarded as a low-noise surfacing, which emerged in the late 1990’s. There is additional advice to CRTN procedures in the Design Manual for Roads and Bridges in the noise and vibration standard HD213. Revised in 2011, HD213 sets out an example methodology which can be used to determine appropriate road surface corrections for low-noise surfaces.

The Department does not hold any information about the surface of or treatments applied to the roads at the location of accidents within the road accident dataset (Stats19 data).

An e-petition has been placed by Christopher Caswell on HM Government e-petitions. To date, 14 October 2014, it has received 13, 587 signatures and closes on the 30 March 2015.

The Department has also received a small number of correspondence from MPs, the public and a trade association.

This Government takes the issue of road safety and the condition of the road network very seriously.

There are many types of materials to resurface the highway network and surface dressings have been safely used for many years on all classes of road. This type of dressing seals the old road surface, preventing the ingress of water which causes deterioration of the road surface, and the road matrix and thus reducing the risk of wider scale deterioration and road failure. When designed and laid properly they pose no additional risks. On many roads, where traffic flow are not excessively high, surface dressings have been shown to be both cost-effective and sustainable.

The Highways Agency, responsible for the motorway and trunk road network, do not routinely use this type of dressing due to the high traffic flows. For local roads however, which are the statutory responsibility of local highway authorities, it is for each individual authority to decide on the most suitable materials to be used for resurfacing and repair works, based upon their local knowledge and circumstances.

The strategic road network has proved to be very resilient during the recent period of unprecedented weather. There have been very few long-term closures of the strategic road network this winter, showing that there is a proportionate level of resilience built into the network.

The Highways Agency operates a flood risk management strategy which sets out the framework for managing risks of flooding on and from the strategic road network. The Highways Agency is also working with the Environment Agency and the British Geological Survey to enhance its existing information on the risks of rising groundwater levels, presence of soluble rocks and surface water flooding.

The Highways Agency uses real-time traffic flow data to provide live information to its customers and stakeholders. A variety of channels are used, including the Highways Agency's website, national and local radio and through social media. The Highways Agency also uses variable message signs on the strategic road network to inform road users about incidents and delays on the national and on significant local roads nearby.

During the recent floods, the Highways Agency erected a number of hard signs along carriageways advising customers to tune into local radio for more information on the flooding and provided flooding specific advice on Information Points within motorway service areas. The Highways Agency will however be investigating the scope for further improvements to real-time information for drivers, following the recent recommendation of the Transport Select Committee review into winter resilience.

The Highways Agency has 24/7 incident response arrangements to clear any incidents, which have been supplemented by proactive measures to keep routes open by pumping flood water away or installing temporary barriers. The feasibility of engineering more permanent mitigations to known risk locations will continue to be assessed.

Following the Pitt review of the 2007 flooding, new procedures were introduced by the Highways Agency's Traffic Officer Service for releasing and turning around trapped traffic alongside an increase in the number of emergency turnaround points, egress points and central reserve crossing points.

The Highways Agency has no dedicated resources to provide direct customer welfare in the event of traffic being trapped for an extended period. The agency's efforts are concentrated on getting the traffic moving as quickly as possible and it plays a full part in multi-agency major incident response plans which are owned by the Local Resilience Forums.

It is right that victims of crime get the support they need. The Code of Practice for Victims of Crime (Victims' Code) requires that any person alleging they are a victim of criminal conduct that falls under the National Crime Recording Standard, or who has had an allegation made on their behalf, is entitled to services under the Code. Where a person has died as a result of criminal conduct, or is unable to receive services as a result of a disability, the victim's family spokesperson is entitled to receive services under the Code. The Government recently consulted on a review of the Victims’ Code. The consultation ran from 29 March until 10 May. We are analysing the responses and intend to publish the Government's response this summer.

In addition, for the three financial years from 1 April 2011, the Ministry of Justice allocated a total of approximately £820,000 funding for services for victims of road crime. These expert services were delivered to victims through organisations such as Brake, the Road Victims Trust, Aftermath Support and RoadPeace.

The information requested falls within the responsibility of the UK Statistics Authority. I have asked the authority to reply.

Letter from Glen Watson, dated June 2013:

As Director General for the Office for National Statistics (ONS), I have been asked to reply to your Parliamentary Question about whether road traffic accident victims, including victims of law breaking drivers, will be counted in crime statistics. 157715

Responsibility for the publication of the National Statistics on crime for England and Wales transferred from the Home Office to the ONS on 1 April 2012 and so it is now for ONS to decide on the coverage of such statistics.

Victims of law breaking drivers who are involved in road traffic accidents should already be covered by the main recorded crime collection if the incident comes to the attention of the police, but the number of offences is not separately identifiable.

The basis of crime statistics is to record incidents which are criminal on an offence type basis according to criminal law. Thus the police will record what offence has been committed rather than by the means by which it was committed. As such, there is no way of identifying all road traffic accident victims of law breaking drivers as they will be included in a range of offence types.

The recorded crime collection has the specific following offences:

Causing death by dangerous driving

Causing death by careless driving when under the influence of drink or drugs

Causing death by careless or inconsiderate driving.

In addition, the police recorded crime collection also includes the offence of 'dangerous driving'. Within that category it is not possible to separately identify those incidents involving a victim of a road accident from those where there was no accident (for example reckless driving that did not result in an accident or injury to a specific victim).

It is also possible that a small number of victims of road traffic accidents will be included within other categories of recorded crime, such as 'assault with injury' where the police decide that the intent of a driver was to inflict injury on a victim. However, it is not possible to separately identify such incidents as these are aggregated with other assaults.

It would not be possible to count separately the number of victims of law breaking drivers who are involved in road traffic accidents without fundamentally changing the basis of crime statistics. Our users place great value on having a consistent time series and so we have no plans to change the basis upon which crime statistics are collected.

The Department of Transport publishes a regular set of statistics on the full range of road traffic accidents including, for example, where an injury results as well as data on traffic incidents involving alcohol and breath tests.

Data on road traffic collisions is recorded by police forces and collected centrally by the Department for Transport (DFT).

DFT make the data publicly available through data.gov.uk; the full 2012 dataset will be available at the end of June 2013.

Developers and third party users can use this data to create their own online maps, apps and websites and some of these have already been created and are available on data.gov.uk/apps. For this reason, there are no plans to publish on police.uk.

I refer the hon. Member to the written answer from the then Under-Secretary of State for Transport, my hon. Friend the Member for Hemel Hempstead (Mike Penning), on 9 July 2012, Official Report, columns 73-74W.

Additional information is available on pages 5-6 of Reported Road Casualties Great Britain 2011: Overview and trends in reported road casualties, which is available at:

https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/9274/rrcgb2011-01.pdf

In each of the last 10 years in Great Britain, the number of people killed in reported personal injury accidents on (a) motorways, (b) A roads and (c) B roads were as follows:

Data for the year 2012 will be available in June 2013.

The information requested is given in the following table: