To ask the Minister of the Environment for his assessment of the effectiveness of televised road safety campaigns in increasing awareness.

DOE’s road safety campaigns play a significant part in our aspiration of working towards zero road deaths in Northern Ireland; we have extensive evidence that the Northern Ireland public are aware of and are influenced by these campaigns.

Our campaigns consistently achieve awareness levels of over 90%. The average awareness level for TV advertising is 50%. The campaigns also achieve levels of influence ranging between 72% and 93%, indicating that road safety advertising has been very influential in improving road user attitudes and in producing positive change in behaviours. The industry norm for achieving levels of ‘fairly influenced’ is 30%.

It is difficult to measure the sole or unique contribution that any specific road safety intervention, including advertising, makes towards reducing casualties. However, work by Oxford Economics isolated the importance of the role of DOE advertising and calculated that from 1995 to 2011, some 21,977 men, women and children in Northern Ireland were saved from death and serious injury on our roads. This prevention of death and serious injury means that the economic payback was £10 per £1 invested by DOE, excluding human costs; and £42 per £1 invested including human costs.

I recognise that some of our campaigns can make uncomfortable viewing, but research and tracking evidence has consistently confirmed that they are effective, and that our ‘tell it as it is’ approach is a key reason for that.