To mark what would have been her daughter, Caitlin’s 27th birthday (on 23rd November), Sharron Huddleston has written a blog detailing why she is passionately campaigning to introduce licensing changes and safeguarding measures for novice drivers and their passengers. Please note within the blog there is some description of injuries sustained.

“DON’T LET THIS HAPPEN AGAIN”

These were the words used as the headlines in our local newspaper the day after my daughter Caitlin’s Inquest in September 2018. The words from the coroner, recommending a Graduated Driving Licence system to be implemented nationwide to prevent future deaths from happening in the same circumstances as my daughter, Caitlin, was killed in, as a teenage passenger in a young novice driver’s car.

Unfortunately, we know only too well that horrific deaths on our roads through young driver crashes have sadly continued – while the Government are listening to evidence and the experiences of bereaved families, they have yet to act or learn from other countries who have seen a huge reduction in crashes involving young drivers upon implementing elements of a Graduated Driving Licence system.

I would not be writing this blog for this website as a bereaved parent IF the Government had acted decades ago.

July 14th 2017 – the day our families lives changed forever.

“Do I look OK Mam?”

Little did I know that these would be the very last words that my precious youngest child, Caitlin, would say to me that evening.

I am now so grateful that Caitlin turned to me that evening, to have those last few seconds for us to speak to each other, before she walked out the door, to get into her friends car. She had also asked me to fasten the buttons on the back of her blouse she was wearing, so I also touched her neck for the last time, moments before her leaving our house.

Caitlin was just 18 years old when she accepted a lift to a restaurant from her 18-year-old friend, who had passed her driving test 4 months previously. Heartbreakingly, just moments after leaving our family home, after asking me for reassurance that she looked OK, our beautiful, quietly spoken, kind, sensitive and loving daughter was killed in a fatal road traffic collision, on the A595 in the village of Bootle in Cumbria at approximately 7.55pm on a rural road. Our precious daughter had taken the full impact of the collision into the front passenger door, as the young driver had lost control of the car on a bend in the wet road, while travelling at approximately 50mph on a 60mph road. Caitlin’s horrific injuries to her tiny body were fatal. Her neck that I had just touched moments before was broken. In fact, most of her tiny body had been broken and fatally injured.

The car the teenager was driving had spun on to the opposite carriageway upon entering a wet bend in the road – too fast for her experience of driving, the coroner said. The car was significantly side impacted/t-boned by a van full of work tools driven by a man travelling home in the opposite direction. Caitlin died on impact I have been told, and was trapped in the crushed side of the car for many hours before being extracted from the wreckage. Her friend driving was also killed and the back seat passenger and the van driver were both seriously injured. This was the first time Caitlin had been a passenger in this friend’s car and Caitlin herself couldn’t drive.

In this one crash alone 4 families lives were affected, two families bereaved and 2 people seriously injured.

Since Caitlin’s death I discovered that one of the leading causes of death in the age group of 17-24 year olds is road traffic collisions; a fact I didn’t know beforehand. I now know that many families every year are having to bury their adolescent children through the outdated driving licence system that we have in the UK. Their devastated families lives changed forever…never to be complete, happy families ever again.

At my daughter’s inquest in September 2018, the coroner for Cumbria said the crash was due to the newly qualified driver’s inexperience. There was no breaking of any laws…no mobile phone, drugs or alcohol use. The main cause of young driver crashes is youth and inexperience.

We had to bury our child through someone else’s inexperience of driving. I struggle accepting this reason why I had to bury my daughter and that Caitlin has had her whole life and future taken from her through no fault of her own. If Caitlin had died of a terminal illness and any medical intervention had failed to save her, then that is something out of my control, but someone else’s inexperience of driving? This is a human made problem that can be prevented. Why do Government Ministers and society put cars before humans lives? This is not acceptable. Something has to change to stop this needless loss of lives.

I now know through my daughter’s death as a passenger in a young novice driver’s car, that young drivers are disproportionately likely to be involved in a crash, and that almost a quarter (24%) of people killed or seriously injured on Britain’s roads are in a collision with a young driver (aged 17-24 years old) even though this age group makes up only about 7% of the total driving population. I also now know that the highest number of collisions involving young drivers happen on rural roads.

This is a neglected problem causing so much physical and emotional pain to everyone involved.

Of the 313 people killed in crashes involving young car drivers in 2017, (the year Caitlin was killed), 108 were young drivers, 55 were their young passengers (Caitlin being one of this total), and 150 were other road users.

In any other walk of life, if this much harm was happening to our younger generation on a daily basis there would be a public outcry, yet young deaths through road crashes seem to be accepted by society and media. Why? This is deeply upsetting and hurtful to anyone who has lost a loved one in a horrific road traffic collision.

The deep shock and disbelief that this horrific death had happened to our daughter Caitlin turned me into a shadow of myself. I couldn’t eat for months and I didn’t want to live without her. I just wanted to sleep and never wake up to the horror and reality that Caitlin wasn’t here and would never come home. How could this have happened to her? But, I have 2 other children who needed their mam, as they too were struggling with the tragedy of losing their younger sister, my 2 young grandsons wondering where Auntie Caitlin was and my husband who was devastated and grieving too for our treasured youngest daughter.

A few months after this tragedy happened to our family, I was made aware of a law that has been in place in other countries, for many years, and has proven to reduce young driver and young passenger deaths in car crashes, for years previously to Caitlin being killed. This law is called a Graduated Driving Licence (GDL) and international evidence shows that GDL, in one form or another, can reduce collisions, and trauma from collisions, involving young drivers, by 20-40%.

GDL systems are a phased approach to driving which builds experience to minimise risk to young and novice drivers; like an apprenticeship for young people, with safeguards put in place, before more responsibilities are taken on. We accept apprenticeships in our work places. So, why not for young novice drivers?

One element of this law which struck me, was that newly qualified (novice) teenage drivers could not, by law, carry their peer-age friends as passengers for a limited time after passing their driving test, until they had gained more experience in driving solo or with an older experienced driver first.

I couldn’t believe that a law like this existed, and I had never heard about it.

I discovered through my research on young novice drivers, that with every extra same age passenger, they are 4 to 5 times more likely to have a crash, potentially killing themselves and their friends, compared to driving alone.

Every state in the USA, Australia, Canada and New Zealand have GDL. The introduction of a GDL regime in New Zealand led to a 23% reduction in car crash injuries for 15-19 year olds. All Australian states operate a form of GDL, and fatalities among the 15-24 age group reduced by 29%. Nearly all Canadian provinces have introduced a form of GDL, and each has witnessed a corresponding reduction in collisions involving young drivers.

It was and still is, absolutely heart-breaking for our family to know Caitlin’s death was preventable, if only the UK had implemented this life-saving law many years ago. With my research into GDL, I discovered that all through Caitlin’s life and many years before she was even born (1998), many people had campaigned for this law to be introduced in the UK. MPs, road safety charities, insurance companies, police officers and sadly, many bereaved parents who have tragically also lost young teenage children in road traffic collisions – as teenage passengers, young drivers and as other road users. A police officer, PC Ted Thwaites, from our own county of Cumbria, the county in which Caitlin grew up in and was tragically killed in, had campaigned for the introduction of this law for a decade before Caitlin was killed.

I also found through my research that in 2013 (four years before Caitlin’s death), Justin Tomlinson MP, campaigned for the introduction of GDL, and had got as far as a Graduated License Scheme Bill. Unfortunately, there was not enough time to debate the bill. The anticipated green paper for the possibility of a GDL scheme didn’t go ahead.

I quote from a recent report in October 2022 that the RAC Foundation and Rees Jeffrey’s Road Fund jointly commissioned TRL to produce ‘Supporting New Drivers in Great Britain’:

“The debate about Graduate Driving Licensing has stalled in Great Britain over two decades of inquiries and evidence gathering. This is likely partly due to the perception that GDL is a ‘one size fits all’ approach, whereas in reality it is a pick-and-mix suite of measures (for example minimum learning periods, and rules on how many passengers can be carried), that can be tailored to different situations and contexts, and which can support new drivers in their early driving, easing them through the riskiest aspects of being behind the wheel while they develop their skills”.

This report has confirmed that GDL does not lead to reduced access to employment and education for young people, or problems with enforcement, and these worries are broadly unfounded.

We as a family cannot change the inaction of past governments, but we cannot let another 20 years pass without some form of progress to protect our future younger generation. So, I set up ‘Caitlin’s Campaign’ and launched our campaign and website during ‘Road Safety Week’ in November 2018,

on what should have been Caitlin’s 20th birthday ( 23rd November). The campaigning I do is calling on the Government to put safety precautions for young novice drivers in place by law nationwide. The coroner at Caitlin’s inquest agreed with me that strengthening of our driving licensing system (GDL) would help prevent future young deaths from happening in the same circumstances that Caitlin had been killed in. He wrote a Preventing Future Deaths Report, (Regulation 28 Report), to the Department for Transport. I am so grateful for the help and support from the coroner to try to help stop another young person being killed in the same circumstances as Caitlin. Since Caitlin’s Preventing Future Deaths Report in 2018 there have been 5 more coroners around the country calling for a strengthening of the driving licensing system in the UK. This speaks volumes.

I want to let all parents of teenagers, and young drivers themselves, know the risks posed to them upon passing their driving test – everything that I was unaware of before Caitlin’s preventable death. I feel so passionate about this. I am so thankful to Edmund King OBE the President of the AA Charitable Trust who helped me to produce the ‘Caitlin’s Message’ information pages in 2022, after we had worked together the previous year, (2021), on the ‘Caitlin’s Hour’ road safety campaign, raising awareness of the dangers of rural roads to young novice drivers.

The ‘Caitlin’s Message’ information pages were published in the ‘Learning to Drive – The Parents Guide’ booklet published by First Car. I want ‘Caitlin’s Message’ information to be spread far and wide, to raise as much awareness as possible to young people and their parents.

In August 2023, after speaking since 2020 with a couple of bereaved families who also campaign for a phased licensing system (GDL), I decided I wanted to reach out to more bereaved parents to form a group of us, all calling on the Government to implement safety precautions for young novice drivers. I decided to name the group ‘Forget-me-not Families Uniting ‘ as our adolescent children/family members killed through young driver crashes are ‘forgotten’ by Government and have been for decades now. I created this group in the hope that our voices together would be heard and for us to feel stronger campaigning all together.

This is now my focus to carry on living. I am a voice now for Caitlin. I know she would want me to do this and my love for Caitlin gives me the courage to speak up. It’s sadly too late for my precious daughter, but through her name, and sadly her sudden and tragic death, I hope to stop this heart-breaking tragedy from happening to any other innocent person and their family. Let it not be too late for our younger generation, to help them stay safe on our roads, with simple safety precautions put in place after passing their driving test.

There’s a duty of the decision makers in Government to protect our inexperienced young drivers, their young teenage passengers and other road users. Our children should not be classed as statistics in road crashes, they are the most precious gifts we have been given as parents.

In loving memory of my precious daughter, Caitlin Lydia Huddleston, aged 18.

#CaitlinsCampaign #CaitlinsMessage #CaitlinsHour #Forgetmenotfamiliesuniting

Updated on: 2 December 2025