Broadcaster Nick Ross, who has taken a special interest in road safety throughout his career, has been confirmed as the final panellist for the Question Time session at the National Road Safety Conference 2012.
The conference is being hosted by Road Safety GB London Region at the Britannia International Hotel, Canary Wharf, 14-15 November. The event is co-sponsored by Colas, RedSpeed International, Alcolock UK and AA DriveTech.
Nick Ross is one of Britain’s most experienced and versatile broadcasters. He launched breakfast TV and Watchdog, but is still best-known for the BBC top-rated show Crimewatch which he left in 2007 after more than 23 years.
In the 1980s he produced and directed a hugely influential and much-repeated TV inquiry, ‘The biggest Epidemic of Our Times’, which was widely credited with transforming public attitudes and public policy.
Ross was invited to become chairman of RoSPA’s National Road Safety Committee and lobbied highway engineers and the Government to introduce challenging targets for savings in road casualties. The roads minister Peter Bottomley formally accepted Ross’s challenge and new Government targets led to a sustained drop in road casualties.
Currently, Nick Ross serves as a vice president of the IAM and president of the London Road Safety Council.
The Question Time session will once again be chaired by Rob Gifford, executive director of PACTS. The other confirmed panellists are DCC Suzette Davenport, chair of ACPO’s National Roads Policing Operations Forum; Jim Fitzpatrick, MP for Poplar and Limehouse; Jenny Jones, London Assembly member; and Chris King, school crossing patrol supervisor.
The cost of attending the two-day conference starts at £85 per day for day delegates and £295 for residential delegates.
Click here for details of the agenda and other confirmed speakers, or click here for general information about the event.
Once again, as too often, an assumption not based on any known evidence – “new Government targets led to a sustained drop in road casualties”.
The falls over many decades (fatalities per 10bn vehicle km. about 20 times lower than in 1950) were undoubtedly due to better vehicles, tyres, systems (ABS, air bags, seat belts etc.) and roads – but there is not a scrap of evidence that the existence of targets made any dfference whatever, nor could there be.
In other fields targets are increasingly seen as discredited and pernicious in the way they skew decisions to tick the right boxes – as when hospital A&E patients at risk of over-running the 4 hour wait target become in-patients for no other reason. As before, let’s please stick with evidence-based assessment, not wishful thinking, however warm the glow it gives the thinkers.
Sorry to see that my offer to be the dissenting voice on your Panel has been refused.
Idris Francis Petersfield
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