The Road Safety Trust convenes sector experts at Road Safety Strategy Summit

Credit: Onclusive News

Leaders from across the UK road safety community united yesterday (24th February) 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 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.

Held in London at Friends House, the event 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 round-table 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.

Delegates identified strong areas of alignment across key themes, which will now be refined into a formal consensus statement to be issued shortly.

This underlines the sector’s readiness to engage constructively with the Government and speak with one voice in response to the RSS and its delivery.

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.

The Road Safety Trust (RST) played a central leadership role in convening and funding the summit, reflecting its commitment to funding, enabling and championing collaboration that advances road safety outcomes. By bringing together expertise from across the field, the RST continues to support strategic dialogue that can translate research, funding and innovation into practical impact.

PACTS led the development and delivery of the event, facilitating structured discussions and ensuring the outputs can be translated into clear and actionable sector positions. Together, the partnership between the RST and PACTS demonstrates the value of coordinated leadership in advancing shared goals for safer roads.

Paul Steinberg, Deputy Chief Executive of the Road Safety Trust, said: “Yesterday’s Summit was convened to identify and codify areas of consensus across the road safety sector in response to the Government’s new strategy.

“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.”

Jamie Hassall, Executive Director of PACTS, said: “The commitment of the road safety sector to reducing road risk and supporting the Government in achieving its targets was overwhelming. The Government has shown that road safety affects everyone in the country and that these preventable collisions are estimated to have costed £6.9bn in lost outputs in 2024.

“The human toll of around 30,000 people being killed or seriously each year on our roads is just not acceptable. By working together, we can help the Government reduce this down to around 10,000 a year by 2035 with the ultimate aim of reducing this to zero.

“Thanks to the Road Safety Trust we were able to host this event to bring the road safety community together to start to form a consensus statement.

“This feels like a pivotal point for road safety that will sharpen progress for the next decade and we need to ensure we all play our part in turning this into reality.”