IN June this year an action plan was created by The Suffolk Roadsafe Partnership Board to reduce the number of accidents in the county.

IN June this year an action plan was created by The Suffolk Roadsafe Partnership Board to reduce the number of accidents in the county.

This has laid the foundations for the latest campaign, Save A Life, which has been launched in the run-up to Christmas.

The board, which is made up of representatives from Suffolk County Council, Suffolk Fire and Rescue, Suffolk Constabulary, Suffolk Safecam, the Highways Agency and the East of England Ambulance Service, aims to improve road safety and reduce the number of people killed or seriously injured.

The government has released targets for the year 2010, which includes reducing the number of fatal and serious casualties by 40 per cent and reducing the number of road casualties involving children by 50 per cent.

Together they want to do everything in their power to cut down the numbers of people getting killed.

The campaign so far

Suffolk Police have been positioned at various hotspots throughout Suffolk in a bid to catch anyone breaking the law on the roads.

Since the police stepped up their intensive campaign on September 1, officers have handed out fixed penalty notices for 514 seatbelt offences, 81 mobile phone offences, 76 for speeding. There have also been nine vehicles seized for drivers with either no insurance or driving without a licence.

There were 79 fixed penalty notices for other traffic offences, for example vehicle defects. There have also been two arrests for drink drivers.

Fastfacts

- In the first six months of this year an average of one person every day was killed or seriously injured in Suffolk.

- In 2007 42 per cent of all fatal accidents, and 31 per cent of killed or serious injury (KIS) accidents were partly down to speeding.

- Last year on average more than seven people were killed, or suffered serious injury on motorcycles each month

- In 2007, the proportion of killed or seriously injured motorcycle casualties rose by 10 per cent against the previous year.

- The number of fatal crash victims aged between 16 and 24 was more than 91 per cent in 2007.