Too many young lives have been lost on Scotland’s roads. We must end this carnage

IN MARCH 2010, a road accident in Inverness took the lives of two city teenagers, Ahlee Jackson and Callum Matheson. It was an event that shocked the city, devastated two families – and started a campaign.

Despite their overwhelming grief, Callum’s parents, Diane and Graham, were emphatic that our roads had to become safer places for young people.

We knew then, as we still do now, that road accidents are the biggest killer of young people across the UK – especially young men. And we know that they are most at risk within their first year of driving.

So, as we began to discuss ideas of how we could tackle that awful fact of life, one idea stood out – a graduated licence that would place certain restrictions on young drivers until they were more experienced on the road.

Now it looks like it is going to happen, with the UK Government announcing yesterday that a pilot scheme is to go ahead. If successful, it could be rolled out across Britain.

It has been a long fight – and throughout, Diane and Graham have been enlightening and inspiring. Although such a scheme might not have prevented the death of Callum, which involved other factors, their commitment to improving road safety moved all of us involved to doing everything we could to support their wishes.

As the campaign grew – and was highlighted in the Scottish Daily Mail – other families who had experienced similar, awful tragedies got involved, desperate to find something positive out of their loss.

Their input, also wrought from their grief, was invaluable. Ultimately, we established the group North of Scotland Driver Awareness Team (NOSDAT), with as broad a make-up as possible to make it inclusive and not party political.

The outcome of our deliberations in NOSDAT was a deci- sion to tackle the problem of road safety in two phases – educational and political.

The resulting campaign, Sensible Driving – Always Arriving: Your Passengers – Your Responsibility, was partly based on a Welsh campaign Deadly Mates – Do You Know Who Yours Are?, which had been set up by Go Safe Wales.

We began with campaign posters. Stagecoach Bus agreed to display them in its local buses as well as slapping a large poster on the back end of a bus serving a busy route – getting the message out to a wide audience.

The Eastgate Centre, in the heart of Inverness, agreed to display posters too – all of which were created by a local print company free of charge.

Message

Another local company printed 5,000 leaflets free to be distributed outside an Inverness Caledonian Thistle football match. Local nightclubs and McDonald’s restaurants also agreed to help circulate them.

The community support was unprecedented and local businesses were only too keen to help – notably a car dealer who provided a free car for the use of the campaign team as they visited schools delivering the road safety message.

At these early stages we also made contact with Dr Sarah Jones, of Cardiff University, and she was able to provide evidence that if a graduated licence scheme was introduced in Scotland alone, up to 22 lives could be saved every year – and up to £80million saved by the Scottish economy.

One of the highlights of those initial stages was the decision to work with a young film-maker from Moray who, with the help of friends of Callum, produced an incredibly powerful 12-minute road safety film. It was subsequently shown to an invited audience at Inverness’s Vue cinema and also broadcast on the campaign website.

The film opens with Diane Matheson speaking about the moment she and Graham were told of their son’s death by the police. The scenes of Callum’s vacant bedroom emphasised their feelings of loneliness, emptiness and loss.

Callum’s close friends also took part in the film and spoke about the effect his death had on them all. It was particularly poignant hearing them talking about the loss of their friend.

The film also looked at the work of the NOSDAT team and championed the need for a graduated licence to be introduced as a pilot scheme in Scotland.

The perspective from younger people on the safety of new drivers contributed hugely to the film’s impact. And over the following months the film was rolled out as a free DVD to all secondary schools in the Highlands and Islands.

Meanwhile, we were also meeting representatives from the Transport Research Laboratory, the RAC Foundation, road safety charity BRAKE and many other interested parties.

As part of the political phase of the campaign I met successive road safety ministers in Westminster and indeed some shadow road safety ministers to impress upon them the benefits of a graduated licence.

We enlisted the help of young drivers too. Rashad Hussain, of Alness, Ross-shire, got involved in 2012 when he was 19 and had almost died after crashing his car.

He had had his licence for only a month and had owned his car for only three days when it left the road and smashed into a wall and a tree, leaving him with head injuries and in coma for seven weeks. He was delighted to take part in the campaign and went into local schools to talk about the importance of road safety.

Alongside the graduated driving licence, we also campaigned on raising the speed limit for HGV drivers on the A9 Perth to Thurso road, and encouraged drivers to dip their headlights in snow, rain and mist.

And while at times it felt as if we were getting nowhere, we knew we had to keep going – because the statistics kept rising.

Four years after Callum died, the RAC Foundation showed that teenage drivers in the North of Scotland were still more likely to be involved in serious or fatal crashes than in any other part of the country.

Campaign

The numbers gave added impetus to the campaign for a graduated licence because we were all too aware that the bare statistics meant another young life lost, another family grieving.

Families such as the Slavovas, who lost their daughter Mirela in 2014 when the 22year-old Bulgarian student died in a head-on collision near the Toll of Birness; families like that of June Ross, who lost her son Ian Buchanan when he was 23 after his best friend lost control of the car they were in on the B993.

So knowing now that the UK Government has finally listened and is going to pilot a graduated driving licence scheme is a huge relief.

It is long past time that this issue was tackled seriously and the graduated licence given some proper support. It’s long past time that the families of young drivers – and the drivers themselves – were given the tools they need to be safer on our roads.

It’s long past time that the carnage on our roads was ended and lives were saved.