Rachel Taylor

It is an honour to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Desmond—I miss our Tuesday morning meetings. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Shrewsbury (Julia Buckley) for securing the debate. I am speaking because road safety for young drivers is a crucial issue in my constituency. My constituency is semi-rural, and learning to drive is a huge part of becoming independent from one’s parents; indeed, my parents forced me to learn to drive at the age of 17 because they did not want to drive me around any more. Local transport links are not good enough: buses do not run regularly enough or late enough for young people to rely on them in order to play sport, go to college, see friends or visit local town centres at weekends. By the age of 17, many of my constituents want to be able to drive to school without having to rely on their parents. Unfortunately, that also means that my constituency has far too many tragic accidents involving young drivers. In 2000, four teenagers died after Adam, a 17-year-old newly qualified driver, crashed his car. Adam, Jonathon, Craig and James were planning to celebrate the birthday of one of their friends just a few hours after Adam crashed. An inquest found that defects in the vehicle’s condition, tyre pressure imbalance and a comparative lack of driving experience were contributing factors to Adam’s crash. In 2017, Trudi-Mae Kennell, Ryan Barber and Will Louch died on a journey back from Snowdonia to Atherstone and an unnamed 18-year-old was arrested on suspicion of causing death by dangerous driving. Most recently, in 2024, a teenage boy suffered serious head injuries after his car hit a tree and caught fire in Polesworth. It was reported as miraculous that he survived the crash. All those young people had so much ahead of them, and it is sad to see that their crashes belong to a pattern. There is so much discussion about what policies to propose to tackle this issue, but the first must be to push for our young people to wear seatbelts. Between 2019 and 2023, 16% of younger car drivers involved in serious collisions did not wear seatbelts. We need to make sure that our young people know that if they do not feel confident driving with passengers, they should not do so. We need to make sure that before passing a driving test, young people have experience of driving in the dark and with passengers. And we need to make sure we, as adults, challenge risky driving behaviour whenever we see it.