Why Young Drivers Need More Support

Why do we not think about road deaths and injury seriously enough? 29,910 people were killed or seriously injured last year.

The approach that we take isn't proportionate to that 29,910

people.

And I have asked the question why for a long time, and I guess that my campaign has been different.

So I started with, well, Why don't we do that? My kind of drive was to try and answer the why question.

So I initially decided to do a politics degree and to see whether my brain was still working, to see whether I could answer the why question.

So my background's in the health service, so I'm educated and experienced in the health service, but politics was something new.

So I did that and I met an amazing professor from Leeds who said to me, she said to me, You, you need to do a PhD here.

And I went, don't be daft.

I'm my age.

I'm too old.

I'm not, I'm not clever enough.

Anyway, fast forward, I ended up doing a PhD and she ended up being my, one of my two supervisors.

And I wanted to ask the question, why, why do we not respond appropriately to road death, uh, injury? Even the amount of crashes that happen on our roads are there every single day, many, many, many, many times.

So I did a PhD.

Lots of my family said I was completely mad.

They're probably right.

But I got a PhD trying to understand why.

And I guess that's when I started campaigning because after the PhD, you have to be politically neutral and objective and scientific.

So I, although I had campaigned in West Yorkshire where I live, prior to that, I made a fundamental mistake by trusting politicians by asking them to do things in private.

And I learned that, which I guess at my age was maybe a little bit naive, but I just hoped that people would go, oh yes, West Yorkshire needs to do something differently with road safety and let's do something, but they didn't.

So afterwards I changed tack.

So I went public.

I, I, and the reason I guess I did all of that was I didn't want my story that much in the public domain.

And I think we, we, we ask people like me and Sharon, we, we society politicians ask society, I, I ask of society to listen to people like me and Sharon to, share something that's really very private.