Reform’s decision to scrap lollipop ladies in Durham, saving
£80,000, has created predictable uproar over children’s safety. However, the empirical evidence as to the effectiveness of lollipop ladies in reducing traffic accidents is disputable at best; and, besides, children’s safety is not the be all and end all of public policy anyway. Indeed, lollipop ladies cost more than the expected benefits of children’s lives saved; thus, the rational decision is to make them redundant. Society must face up to the fact the optimum number of children killed by cars is above zero.
They couldn’t be sure of the overall effect on safety though because of no control for potentially increased walking to school due to lollipop ladies which could’ve actually brought down the collision rate per mile walked. How could lollipop ladies not reduce collisions with children? They lull kids into a false sense of security which stops them from looking properly. And not looking properly contributes to
78 per cent of all road casualties.
Even if lollipop ladies do reduce accidents among children however that alone does not warrant their existence: lollipop ladies need to pass a cost benefit analysis. Let us do a few back of an envelop calculations. In 2024 among under 15s pedestrians,
20 were killed,
1,253 seriously injured and
3,342 minorly injured; let’s assume lollipop ladies stop these figures from increasing by 5 per cent.
Using
Department of Transport prices on life, i.e. £2.4m, and, serious and minor injury (uprated for inflation), we get an expected benefit of about £23m per year. Across Great Britain today there are about
5,000 lollipop ladies costing about £6,000 each, or, £30m per year overall. The cost benefit analysis comes back with a net cost of lollipop ladies of £7m. £8m if we go by the police’s laxer understanding of serious injury.
This result is very generous to lollipop ladies too because I’m assuming that 5 per cent reduction, despite there being only
one for every 43 miles of local road and them working only part time and at term times. Plus, between 2010 and 2018 death and serious injury among under 15s pedestrians fell by
32 per cent at the same time lollipop lady numbers fell by
29 per cent; so, they obviously don’t make a huge difference to road safety.
At this point mothers will be shocked by the coldness of cost benefit analysis, ‘You can’t put a price on life!’, they will say. Such a statement is a refusal to face up to reality. For a start, what does it even mean? Does it mean nothing can be given up for it? If life were infinitely valuable that would imply we should reduce the speed limit to zero mph. Bonkers. Life clearly has a finite price and is shown by the fact we’ll cross the road to get a better pastry showing the marginal value of the better pastry is more than the chance of dying in a car accident. If life were infinitely valuable, we’d be irrational to do so. If mothers are still uneasy of my cost benefit analysis, their real gripes should be with the Department of Transport’s valuation of life.
Despite professing cost benefit analysis here, I am not a utilitarian; indeed, I deplore utilitarianism. You can’t have Formula 1 around a town even if the expected revenue massively exceeds the cost of the couple of children who will be accidentally kill. Nevertheless, utilitarian or not, we all accept there will be some death on the roads; otherwise, we’d have a speed limit at low as 10mph.
Certainly, children are not wronged by the higher risk imposition from motorists at school times which might be said to require a lollipop lady to mitigate, or, motorists driving past children without a lollipop lady would all, implausibly, be bad people. Lollipop ladies then are a nice benefit for children but not morally required.
It’s never popular to tell grieving parents their child wasn’t saved because the increased cost of safety measures outweighed the expected benefit of them. This unpopularity though doesn’t make the decision to stop spending on safety measures wrong. Life is not of infinite value and trade-offs in public policy, as in life generally, have to be made: Cost benefit analysis is a half decent way of making them. Lollipop ladies simply don’t pass this test and for that reason should be scrapped, or, only reserved for the most dangerous crossings.