Although we have seen reasonable road casualty reductions on British roads over the last two decades, 2016 saw the highest annual death toll since 2011. Finding the right funding mechanisms for safety improvements to our road infrastructure is absolutely essential if we are to break the current plateau in the number of people being killed on our roads.

DfT’s Safer Roads Fund provided a much-needed source of funding specifically for reducing risk on the most ‘dangerous’ local authority A-roads in England. The Fund was truly innovative, and allowed local authorities to use new proactive risk reduction approaches in the form of the iRAP (International Road Assessment Programme) protocols, and to apply Safe System principles in a way that many of them haven’t had the opportunity to do for some time.