The Devon and Cornwall PCC has suggested 'levelling up' fines in order to make roads safer.

Police and Crime Commissioner, Alison Hernandez, has called upon driving fines to be increased in order to make more money to put towards road safety.

In a statement during her time giving evidence at the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, the re-elected PCC said: "One area of interest is the level of offending on our roads from poor driver behaviour generally.

"And there is an absolute appetite from the public, we carried out a survey about 18 months ago on road safety through the Association of Police and Crime Commissioners and over 66,000 people responded to that survey.

"It was absolutely clear that, 70% of the time, people are witnessing offending behaviour happening on the street, on their roads and where they live.

Read Next:

"So there is an appetite for more enforcement and there is an appetite for the fines which are in there (the PCSC bill) about delivering courses for some of those driver behaviours that we would be able to do.

"I think that's really great that that's in the bill.

"There is another one as well that we're really interested to see which would be a levelling up of the fines that you actually get at the moment for some of those offences.

"It's all different, whether you're speeding, or you're using your mobile phone, not wearing a seatbelt, the fines are all at different levels.

"Our suggestion, that we would like to see, is actually 'why don't you level up the fines?' and then you've actually got also an opportunity to spend more funding on road safety."

On Twitter, public reaction to the comments was mixed, with some users saying that an increase in fines would be welcomed in order to prevent dangerous driving.

On the other hand, other users criticised the idea, saying that road safety should not depend on financial penalties and that the idea that if everyone drove within the law road safety safety would become a dud issue was flawed.