On the third floor of the unremarkable Westminster building that houses the Department for Transport is an area known as Zone 4. It is surrounded by the usual office paraphernalia — water cooler, pot plants, jokey headlines pinned up from newspapers — but it has an unusual and serious purpose.

In this section sits Sarah Wardle, a pleasant and helpful civil servant with the title assistant economist, integrated transport economics and appraisal. Every day Wardle sits down to the task of updating how much your (and my) life is worth. With spreadsheets and formulas that include such factors as “nominal GDP increase, medical and ambulance costs, lost output, human cost”, she calculates how much the government should spend to try to keep you alive.

After combining and checking the figures she issues an annually updated document called Highways economic note No 1 (HEN1), a 12-page memorandum that helps councils balance the costs of improving a poorly cambered bend or installing lights at a badly lit junction against the seemingly unquantifiable worth of a human life.

HEN1, Appendix One, contains a seven-digit number that economists call, opaquely, the VPF — the value of preventing a statistical fatality. This year HEN1 will value a life on the roads at £1,428,740. The 2004 figure is there on the web for everyone to see, though you wouldn’t find it if you didn’t know where to look.

The value is lower than that used in America (£2m) or Switzerland (£1.65m), though higher than in Germany (£1.06m) or France (£800,000).

Calculating the VPF is not just an academic exercise: it decides how resources are spent to reduce deaths on different forms of transport as well as to avoid industrial illness and accidents. Even when the government is not doing the spending, it uses the VPF to make safety rules for private industry.

But all life is not valued the same. For example, at £1.4m, life on the road in Britain is cheaper than the monetary value placed on the life of someone on a passenger boat (£2.5m), someone who risks cancer working with, for example, carcinogenic chemicals or asbestos (£2.9m), or someone at risk from the consequences of a nuclear accident (up to £14.3m).

That is because the government argues that people understand that roads are inherently dangerous and are prepared to run a higher risk of accident or illness than they are, say, when on a ferry, or in a workplace.

To most of us this may seem like distasteful book-keeping. But it translates into decisions made every day on whether to improve accident blackspots and how much to spend.

Few people are more aware of this than Bill McMillan. As a director of the Atomic Energy Authority, McMillan helped oversee stringent power plant safety measures. Now retired, he has been fighting for five years to persuade Kent county council to move some hedges and paint double white lines along the lethal B2026 road near his home in Cowden.

“They place far less value on preventing deaths than we did in nuclear power,” he says. “When you sneeze in a nuclear power station it is noted and recorded . . . Whereas in a local road dispute, a single death will never make the headlines.”

On February 7 this year Daniel Hughes, 17, a gifted guitarist and tennis player, an all-round nice guy with a cheeky smile, died on the narrow, winding B2026 not far from McMillan’s home.

Each day Anna, Daniel’s mother, visits his grave in the green churchyard of All Saints, Brenchley. On the latest visit, there are five bunches of flowers and a couple of inscribed tennis balls on top.

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