You report that Lord Ahmed wants to learn from his mistake and work with road safety groups.

Many others who have been involved in crashes have chosen to do the same.

But what was his mistake? It would seem that texting was not the cause of his crash.

And how do you define safety? Safety helmets and safety belts are nothing of the sort – they merely mitigate the effects when safety has failed.

It has long been the trend among politicians that the way to improve road safety is to add ever more legislation.

Using road deaths as a criterion in assessing how effective legislation has been is quite wrong – every collision is potentially fatal. Non-injury collisions are not even officially recorded.

Despite the proliferation of cameras with the occasional police patrol, the vast majority of your time on the road goes unmonitored.

So the prime factor in deciding how you behave is simply that of self-preservation and, perhaps to a lesser extent, the effect which any injury you might inflict on another person has on your conscience.

Put simply, laws which attempt to modify behaviour will fail.

Laws which mandate certain penalties resulting from any crash clearly have nothing to do with safety – they merely penalise rather than prevent errant behaviour.

This Government chose education as one of its platforms in the 1997 election. In road safety, in particular, education, rather than legislation is the way forward.

Other than the rare case of a driver collapsing at the wheel (with obviously unforeseeable results) there is no such thing as an accident – all are avoidable.

Anthony G Phillips Salisbury Wiltshire