Trust convenes sector experts at Road Safety Strategy Summit
Leaders from across the UK road safety community united last week for a Road Safety Strategy Summit, convened and led by The Road Safety Trust and PACTS (the Parliamentary Advisory Council for Transport Safety).
The event on Tuesday 24 February marked an important step in developing a coordinated response to the Government’s recently published Road Safety Strategy (RSS). Its aim was to achieve consensus on what the sector welcomes from the strategy, how it can support its delivery, and what it would like to see built on and developed further.
It brought together policymakers, practitioners, researchers and advocates to identify areas of sector consensus and strengthen collective engagement with the Government. The five key topics under discussion were:
- Public consent and legitimacy
- Young, novice and high-risk road users
- Enforcement, justice and legitimacy
- Infrastructure, place and inequality
- Data, evidence and learning
Through facilitated roundtable discussions and whole-room synthesis sessions, delegates worked to define shared positions on key issues affecting the future of road safety policy and delivery. By the end of the event, there was clear progress towards a shared response to the RSS, providing a strong foundation for collective influence from the road safety community.
A key outcome of the summit will be the development of the sector consensus statement, capturing agreed principles arising from the discussions. This forthcoming statement, which will be issued through PACTS, will form a collective reference point for engagement with the Government and stakeholders, helping to strengthen the impact of the sector in shaping road safety policy and implementation.
Paul Steinberg, Deputy Chief Executive of the Road Safety Trust, said:
“The publication of a national strategy for the first time in many years marked a significant moment. It was therefore important that the sector responded in a structured and disciplined way, recognising where meaningful progress has been made, while being clear about where ambition may need to go further.
“The consensus statement arising from this summit, to be published in the near future, will provide Government with a credible, evidence-led indication of where alignment genuinely exists, while respecting the independence of individual organisations’ consultation responses.”
