It gets said every time a tragedy occurs on our roads that it’s “one too many”.
With that in mind, it is important to note that the number of road fatalities has increased consistently each year since 2021.
At the same time, the Department for Infrastructure has seen its budget put under severe pressure.
There has been a drop in the number of PSNI road safety officers and cuts to road safety advertising.
Also, in the last five financial years, a total of £3.2m has been returned to the Treasury by the NI Road Safety Partnership.
This is because of an issue that has faced many Stormont departments, arm’s length bodies and other organisations here — government guidelines around spending.
The NI Road Safety Partnership was set up to reduce deaths on our roads through detecting speeding and is funded by speeding fines and other fees.
However, strict guidelines have meant that the NI Road Safety Partnership has been unable to spend millions in income in recent years due to strict government rules.
Thankfully, we may have seen an end to this problem going forward. The NI Road Safety Partnership has been lobbying local government and the Home Office to broaden its expenditure parameters.
These wider parameters have now been secured and the NI Road Safety Partnership has developed an investment plan for 2024/25. Hopefully this will go some way to reducing the number of deaths on our roads, but much more needs to be done.
Northern Ireland’s road infrastructure is crumbling, while several planned upgrades to major roads have been beset by delays.
For instance, plans for a new A5 dual carriageway — which links Derry to Aughnacloy — were first approved by the Executive in 2007, but have been beset by legal challenges and funding issues.
Since 2006, there have been more than 50 deaths on the road. There have also been delays in introducing safety measures on the A1 dual carriageway between Belfast and Dublin.
In 2019, it was estimated that it would cost around £1.2bn to bring our roads network up to standard, a figure that will have increased significantly in the years since.
Chronic underfunding has led to our road network deteriorating.
Earlier this year, the Department for Infrastructure said the estimated value of the shortfall in funding between what was needed to maintain the network and what was actually available to be spent between 2014 and 2023 was around £920m.
Urgent action is needed to fix our road network before more lives are lost.