Opinion: Can 2024 mark the start of a new era of EU-UK cooperation on road safety?

Antonio Avenoso, Executive Director, European Transport Safety Council

With a new government in Westminster perhaps there will be opportunities to undo some of the damage done to cooperation on road safety when the UK-EU transition agreement ended back in 2021.  

First, it’s worth reminding ourselves how the ‘hard’ Brexit the previous UK government chose to pursue made improving road safety more difficult.  

EU legislation on cross-border enforcement of traffic offences no longer applies, meaning the UK is not able to follow-up on traffic penalties such as speeding tickets from foreign-registered drivers.  Bilateral agreements between the UK and EU Member States could have changed this but have not yet materialised.  

Another significant and immediate loss of data exchange was in the field of vehicle defects and recalls.  The UK is no longer a part of the EU / EEA SafetyGate rapid alert system for product defects.  There was a commitment in the UK exit agreement to set up a method of exchanging data between the EU system and the future UK one, but four years later this has not been worked out, to our knowledge.

The UK is also no longer subject to EU rules on road infrastructure safety management, which have now been updated to cover a wider range of road types, and must now take standards for vulnerable road users into account. 

The UK is not party to the EU target to reduce road deaths and injuries by 50% by 2030 and no longer provides data on road deaths and serious injuries to the EU CARE database, an important source for benchmarking of road safety performance in Europe.  While Norway, Switzerland and Iceland send their data every year from outside the EU, the UK is now just a blank row in the database.  

The UK must also set its own national targets to reduce deaths and serious injuries, and anchor these in a road safety strategy. A new strategy is now on the cards, according to a spokesperson for the UK’s department for transport quoted by the BBC in July.  

In the field of vehicle regulation, the UK has set up its own vehicle type-approval system.  Vehicles now have to meet both the UK and EU standards if they are to be sold in both markets.  But in reality the UK requirements have simply frozen along the lines of the 2009 EU standard, while the EU moved forward with a wide range of mandatory new in-vehicle safety technologies from 2022 onwards.  

These changes illustrate the paradox of Brexit.  While sold as ‘taking back control’ – in fact regulating these areas is complex, resource-intensive and difficult to do as a single country – especially when public budgets have been cut across the board. The result is not moving further faster but rather stasis and decline.  

The lack of cooperation with the EU is one thing.  But it’s hard to ignore the lack of national action in recent years.  The last UK government appeared to give up on improving road safety completely.  In the last ETSC PIN annual report, the UK placed 27th out of 32 countries in terms of reduction in road deaths since 2013.  Even the modest planned initiatives, such as legislation on safe regulation of e-scooters and the establishment of a road crash investigation branch, never got off the ground. 

One ray of light was the agreement, belatedly done, that the UK can continue to participate in the EU’s flagship €94bn Horizon Europe research funding programme.   This deal shows that individual agreements on any of the above areas are possible if both sides are willing.  

Norway applies EU vehicle safety standards, Switzerland sends data to the EU CARE database…the UK could cooperate much more than it does today, to the benefit of both sides. 

The UK was a hugely influential player in vehicle and road safety in the EU for almost 50 years.  UK research was fundamental to the new EU vehicle safety standards that have yet to be applied in the country that played an important role in writing the rules. 

Brexit was a huge blow to combined road safety efforts.  But now is the time to look forward, seek areas to work together again and get EU-UK cooperation on road safety out of neutral and back, at least, into first gear.