Provisional figures released by Department for Transport today reveal a very worrying trend in road deaths, showing a 1% rise from 3,177 to 3210.

The figures are the quarterly provisional estimates for period ending Q3 2006.

Safe Speed estimates that road deaths should be falling by between 4% and 5%, based on various engineering and medical gains. In order to offset this benefit 'something else' must be going badly wrong - and we know exactly what it is.

Paul Smith, founder of the Safe Speed road safety campaign(www.safespeed.org.uk) said: "Road deaths should not be rising. We know we're putting safer vehicles on the roads each year, we know we're improving the engineering of crash black spots and we know we're getting better at post crash care. The growth in traffic is nowhere near enough to offset these very substantial gains."

"I know exactly what's happening - we have the wrong road safety policy and it's making our drivers worse. Speed cameras and 'speed kills' policy is badly affecting driver skills and especially driver attitudes."

"This is a crisis in road safety - we must get back to policies that value skills and attitudes and we must have policies that effectively police the growing 'rogue driver' problem."

"Trends in serious injuries continue to appear to show an improvement, but last year the British Medical Journal found that road crash hospitalisation hadn't fallen for a decade despite huge gains in the official 'serious injury'statistics. This is ample evidence that the serious injury trend does NOT represent a genuine improvement in road safety."