Sheena Grant was sitting on the back seat of her friend’s Peugeot with her
five-year-old daughter Mia when they collided head-on with a Toyota Carina
being driven by a young Polish woman going the wrong way round a roundabout.
Sheena, 25, had been on her way home from Basingstoke to Reading. It was
Sunday and she was due to sing with the gospel choir in church that evening.
Instead she spent it in intensive care, her young daughter just a few yards
away and also badly injured. Three days later, on November 29, 2006, after
three operations to try to save her life, Sheena died. Mia, now 6, suffered
a ruptured spleen but survived.
Last month Joanna Filipiak, 32, a Polish national working in Hampshire, was
sentenced to nine months in prison for causing Sheena’s death. Witnesses
recalled seeing her leave a petrol station about half a mile from the
roundabout and driving onto the right-hand side of the road. “There were
witnesses trying to flag her down to say she was on the wrong side of the
road but she obviously didn’t see or didn’t understand and just continued
driving on the right,” says Karl Grant, 32, Sheena’s brother. “My sister
suffered the most horrific injuries and in the end nothing could be done to
save her.”
Sheena’s story (and to a lesser extent that of Filipiak, who was in tears
throughout the trial), though a tragedy for her family, would be soon
forgotten by the wider world were it not part of a growing trend sparked by
the expansion of the European Union in 2004 and the arrival in Britain of
hundreds of thousands of eastern European workers. For the most part this
has meant the welcome arrival of hard-working Polish and Latvian builders,
and borsch and pickled cabbage on the shelves of Tesco, but where there has
been a negative impact is on road safety. Many of the new arrivals have a
shaky grasp of English and the Highway Code, are unaccustomed to driving on
the left and are frequently hard to trace if driving on foreign numberplates.
The figures speak for themselves: a 47% rise in five years in the number of
foreign drivers involved in accidents on British roads, according to the
Association of British Insurers (ABI). The number of crashes involving
Polish drivers, who make up the largest proportion of recent immigrants, has
risen tenfold, from 361 in 2001 to 3,132 in 2006 (an ABI figure).
New figures revealed by the police to The Sunday Times under the Freedom of
Information Act show a rise of 27% in the arrest rates of eastern European
drivers since 2005, in the 15 police-force areas that provided data. By far
the largest proportion of the increase is down to drink-driving. In the
eight months from April to November last year just less than 6% (99 out of
1,678) of drink-drive arrests in Sussex were of drivers from eastern Europe.
In Suffolk 7% of those arrested for drink-driving in the year 2006-7 were from
eastern Europe (83 offences out of 1,198), up from a handful in 2003-4. In
Cambridgeshire, which has one of the fastest growing populations in Britain
thanks to the influx of more than 80,000 migrants to the county since 2004,
the figure is 17.5%.
Julie Spence, chief constable of Cambridgeshire, has complained of some
immigrants arriving with “different standards” from the native population
and said police funding had failed to keep pace with the huge rise in the
population, particularly with the added cost of providing interpreters.
Chief Inspector Rick Dowell, head of Dorset police’s traffic unit, echoed
Spence’s concerns, adding: “The attitude of eastern European drivers is not
as educated. Latvians’ attitude to speeding is the same as in the UK 10
years ago.” You need only type “Polish drivers” into the YouTube search
engine to get the sense that our eastern European neighbours tend to adopt a
more relaxed attitude to the rules and regulations of the road. A string of
clips on the video-sharing website catalogues a host of misdemeanours, with
titles such as Crazy Polish Drivers, Polish Drivers in Action!, Polish Bad
Driver and Exemplary Polish Drivers, in which a string of cars are shown
manoeuvring around a closed level crossing, oblivious to the red flashing
warning light. Genuine or not, these videos illustrate how Polish motorists
are seen abroad.
All this is tarnishing Britain’s hard-earned reputation for road safety. The
UK, along with Sweden, Denmark and the Netherlands, has had one of the best
road safety records in Europe. According to the last annual roundup of
European transport statistics conducted by the European Road Safety
Observatory, a safety body part-financed by the EU, there were nearly three
times as many fatalities per million inhabitants in Poland (150) as in the
UK (57) in 2004, and there were almost four times as many in Lithuania (219)
and Latvia (223).
Seatbelt usage is less strictly enforced in most eastern European countries
than in the UK, and speed cameras are less prevalent. And although the
drink-drive limit is actually lower than in Britain, anecdotal evidence
suggests there can be on occasion a tendency to turn a blind eye to some
traffic offences.
But for foreign drivers arriving in Britain there is also the very basic
problem of having to adjust to driving on the left, often while still
driving a left-hand-drive vehicle. In 2005, 20% of accidents involving
foreign-registered lorries were blamed on “sideswipes” – when a lorry pulls
out onto a motorway or dual carriageway and hits a car that was hidden in
its blind spot. The figure is just 7% for British-registered lorries.
“There seems to be a toxic combination of lack of awareness of different road
laws, left-hand-drive vehicles and inconsistencies in driver training, not
to mention the different attitudes and expectations of road safety,” says
Sheila Rainger of the RAC Foundation. “The fact that a lot of the eastern
European workers coming over here are young men may also be a factor, as
they are statistically much more likely to be involved in serious crashes.
And if they are coming here and living with a bunch of other young guys,
there isn’t that calming hand of a family.”
Jenny Wynn, group director of TTC (formerly Telford Training Consultants),
Britain’s largest provider of rehabilitation courses for drivers, blames
cultural differences for the high proportion of eastern European offenders
on its drink-drive awareness courses. One in 10 of those referred by the
courts is now from eastern Europe, according to TTC. They are also twice as
likely, compared with other drink-drivers, to be serious offenders,
exceeding the legal alcohol limit by 2½ times or more.
“Although the drink-drive limit is lower in some of these countries it is
sometimes not as rigidly enforced,” Wynn claims. “We have been told on a
number of occasions by people who attend our courses that when they are
pulled over by a police officer in some of these eastern European countries,
they bribe the officer to let them off the offence.
“Another problem is a tendency among some eastern Europeans to drink heavily
at night, so there is a good chance they will still be over the legal limit
in the morning.”
Wynn, who says TTC provides Polish interpreters on its drink-drive courses,
thinks the government should provide more information to migrants arriving
in Britain. “There is an issue of getting appropriate material out there
that people can understand. We need to inform people before they commit a
crime.”
Some local authorities, including Devon and Cornwall, have now started to
issue information leaflets to drivers in Polish and other eastern European
languages, and the official driving theory test is now available to sit in
Polish. A friend or interpreter is permitted to accompany a learner driver
during the practical driving test. Some councils have even trialled
Polish-language road signs.
The ABI would like to see wing-mirror extensions made compulsory for all
left-hand-drive vehicles, particularly lorries. It is also calling on all EU
states to recognise driving penalties incurred in other member countries.
This is a major stumbling block. Many Polish drivers continue to drive on
their Polish plates for months, even though the rules dictate that anyone
spending more than six months in the UK a year must register their car here.
Some are simply avoiding the cost and inconvenience; others do it on
purpose, knowing they are much less likely to be pursued for unpaid parking
fines or congestion charges or more serious offences. There is currently no
cross-border recognition (except between Britain and the Irish Republic) of
traffic offences, even within the European Union. So if a foreign national
commits a driving offence in this country, it is very difficult for the
British authorities to pursue the case without the accused’s cooperation.
The Local Transport Bill, which is currently passing through parliament,
includes a proposal to give the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA)
the power to pass on the details of drivers from other European countries to
local authorities, so they can pursue noncriminal penalty charges in their
area. The Road Safety Act 2006, which is currently being phased in, includes
a provision to allow the police to demand on-the-spot deposits from drivers
who commit any of a number of traffic offences such as overloading and
speeding and who are not resident in this country. Those who successfully
appeal will be refunded.
The Motor Insurers’ Bureau, which handles claims from crashes involving
uninsured drivers, is also calling for a Europe-wide database of insurance
policies to make it easier for the police to check whether foreign drivers
are insured.
Peter Gimber, Devon county council’s road safety manager, sounds a note of
caution. “There is a danger of creating a stereotype,” he says. “The vast
majority of all our court referrals are still English drivers. But that is
not to say that we aren’t aware that people coming to work in Britain may be
bringing with them cultural assumptions that we have to challenge.” Karl
Grant knows that nobody set out to kill his sister; he just doesn’t want
anyone else to go through the same dreadful experience.
He has moved back in with his mother, Grace, to help look after Mia as they
all try to come to terms with Sheena’s death.
“Mia will sometimes cry, and she always needs reassurance that none of the
adults in her life are going to disappear like Mummy,” he says.
“We are still trying to adjust. The main sadness is that Sheena is no longer
with us.
“But I’m very disappointed too that there seems to have been no reaction to
it. I think the government should put something in place for foreign
drivers, some sort of education – maybe a refresher course – just something
that will help to stop this sort of thing happening to someone else.”
