Earlier today we found out there has been another fatal traffic accident related to a police chase, following the death of five men and two police officers on the A66 near Middlesbrough on Saturday morning, which led to the arrests of 14 men and three women. Meanwhile, in County Kildare, Ireland, five teenagers were killed driving the wrong way down the motorway less than two weeks ago.
What is behind this sudden spate of deaths? One familiar bogeyman invoked by the government is social media. Apparently young people are watching videos showing dangerous driving online and this is inspiring them to get behind the wheel and try it for themselves. Andy Burnham has called these videos ‘truly reprehensible’.
Social media platforms of course have a responsibility to take down illegal content, but the truth is that teenagers driving dangerously well predates social media algorithms. This has been a longstanding problem in the traveller community. One study between 1995 and 2004 in Dublin found that 22 per cent of male deaths in the traveller community were from road traffic accidents (they represent less than 1 per cent of deaths in the general population). Is Friendster or MySpace to blame?
In fact, if you track the number of people who have been either killed or seriously injured from dangerous driving between 2005, when YouTube was launched, and last year, it would seem the number of deaths has decreased by over half (58 per cent). The launch and popularisation of TikTok in the late 2010s does not seem to have reversed this trend; serious injuries and deaths from collisions including one younger driver have been below 5,000 per year since 2019.
There are a great range of contributing factors to this recent success story. Efforts to crack down on drink driving have been worked (the number of convictions for drink driving has fallen by over half in the last 20 years), cars are generally safer thanks to better design and scrappage schemes taking old bangers off the road, and teenagers are also less likely to have driving licenses in the first place – the proportion of 17- to 20- year-olds holding a full driving license fell from 48 per cent in 1994 to 29 per cent in 2024. If social media is impacting driving deaths, it may reducing them. Sexual intercourse and drug-taking are also declining. Kids are too busy scrolling to get themselves in trouble.
But more to the point, if Burnham and his government want to do something to stop teenage joyriders, there are bigger fish to fry than algorithms. The maximum penalty for driving without a license is £1,000, which is significantly lower than the average cost of acquiring a license, meaning lots of teenagers circumvent formal training. The fine for driving without insurance is similarly underpowered. There is a mere £300 on-the-spot fine, while the average cost of insurance per year for a 17-year-old is over £1,500.
In practice, the penalties issued for reckless driving can be insultingly small
Driving bans are also far too lenient in Britain. Lifetime bans are rarely issued, even when drivers kill pedestrians. The minimum driving ban set by the sentencing council for causing death by dangerous driving is only five years, and it does not recommend lifetime bans for drivers who have gotten behind the wheel while disqualified and then gone on to kill someone. In practice, the penalties issued for reckless driving can be insultingly small. Take the case of Christopher West, who was sentenced to just 16 months for killing a 15-year-old girl in 2023 with his car. He only received a driving ban of two years and eight months. He was released from prison after six months at the start of this year.
West is just one of many criminals who the government has released early thanks to the state’s apparent inability to build enough prisons to carry out the already light sentences issued in courts. Burnham seems to finding, as Starmer did, that it is much easier to point the finger at technology companies than it is to confront and resolve decades of institutional neglect.
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