A RADICAL £800,000 campaign has been unveiled by road, fire, police and council chiefs today to cut the level of carnage on Dorset’s roads by 30 per cent in a year.

The No Excuse campaign, to be launched on January 15, will see police officers taking to the roads in what Dorset Police describe as a ‘zero tolerance’ blitz on bad driving.

Officers will work 250 two-hour shifts at different locations across the county and will issue on-the-spot fines to people who are failing to concentrate on the road.

Motorists who drive using mobile phones, without seatbelts, at inappropriate speeds or who are distracted by an in-car entertainment system will be pulled over.

They will be asked to attend courses at a Road Safety Centre of Excellence which will be built in Poole as part of the project.

Emergency services representatives, council officers and councillors thrashed out the ambitious project at a Call to Account meeting of Dorset County Council’s Audit and Scrutiny Committee.

During the meeting it was revealed that officials from the Department for Transport visited officers at Dorset County Council earlier this year to perform a road safety health check.

The visit came as statistics revealed that the authority was the worst performing shire county in the country for achieving a 40 per cent reduction in the number of people killed or seriously injured on the roads.

Robert Smith, from the county council’s road safety department, said: “There will be zero tolerance on key behaviours which lead to loss of control and loss of concentration and result in bad driving.

“The campaign will run for a year to make people aware that if they do something they shouldn’t be doing on Dorset’s roads, there are consequences.”

It is hoped that No Excuse will replicate the success of a similar campaign in Essex where the number of people seriously injured or killed on the roads was reduced by 30 per cent in four years.

Reward funding will be made available if the No Excuse campaign cuts down the number of deaths and serious injuries on Dorset roads by the same amount in just one year – from 294, to just under 200.

Alexis Wood, Highways Agency A35 and A31 performance manager, said getting people on board with the education campaign is key for its success.

She said: “Between five and ten per cent of collisions are not caused by roads. We need to get into drivers’ heads that most accidents are caused by drivers.

“People need to understand that driving with a mobile phone is not sensible and driving at 60mph in high winds and when there’s ice on the road is not a good idea.”

Road traffic collisions where someone is killed or seriously injured cost the Dorset economy £90 million each year.

A list of roads has been compiled that have a higher than average number of collisions compared to collision averages for Dorset roads. A scoring system is used based on the number and severity of the collisions, traffic flow, length of road and whether the trend is improving or worsening.

The top 20 routes will undergo a detailed accident analysis investigation within the next year.

West Dorset and Weymouth and Portland contain eight of the county’s 20 accident blackspots, according to the scoring system.

1: A352 junction with the A37 to Sherborne

2: A3066 Bridport to Somerset border,

3: A353 Weymouth to Preston,

4: A354 Dorchester Bypass to Upwey

5: A353 Preston to Warmwell Roundabout,

6: A3030 junction with A352 to A357,

7: C12 Dorchester to junction of the A352,

8: B3157/B3156 Lanehouse to Foords Corner.

RELATIVES who have lost their loved ones in car accidents said urgent measures to improve education for Dorset motorists are necessary.

Chris Horton, 62, is the nephew of Beaminster couple Alastair and Sheila Flattely, who died when their car burst into flames after colliding with a lorry near Evershot on the A37 in May.

Criminal proceedings are now taking place involving the lorry driver.

Mr Horton, who lives in Oxfordshire, said: “There seems to be a real range of things that people do in their cars while driving and they need to understand that using a mobile phone while driving is likely to cause an accident.

“Dorset doesn’t seem to have a particular number of bad roads – it’s fairly rural without any major routes going through it, where there are fewer accidents.”

Widow Janet Wiles, of Dorchester, whose husband Peter was killed in an accident on the A35 at Bloxworth in 2005, said: “Maybe some people will be offended by the Highways Agency saying the majority of accidents are down to driver error, but it’s six of one and half a dozen of the other. Road accidents are down to both.

“I think the campaign is a brilliant idea – this has to be done because things are getting way out of hand.

“People need to drive more carefully and be more aware of what they are doing.

“They shouldn’t complain about receiving on-the-spot fines.

“Would they rather receive a police officer at their door telling them that their partner had been killed in an accident?”