At 17 years old, Harvey Owen was just beginning to figure out what he wanted to do with his life.
The college student had dreams of opening an Italian-style cafe or building a pizza van to take to festivals once he had passed his driving test, and was building up experience with a part-time job at a sourdough pizza restaurant in his home town of Shrewsbury.
After recently hanging up his skateboard for his guitar, he spent most of his days playing songs from his favourite bands and musicians – the Beatles, Gerry Rafferty, Jimi Hendrix.
“He was forever just in his pyjamas playing on his guitar,” said his mother, Crystal Owen. “But recently, every time I came home, he’d have a cookbook open, and he was talking about opening a small cafe, selling sourdough breads that he’d made.”
But in November, Harvey Owen died alongside his three friends Jevon Hirst, 16, Wilf Fitchett, 17, and Hugo Morris, 18, as they were travelling through Snowdonia (Eryri) for a camping trip. The boys were found inside an overturned and partly submerged car, two days after they were last seen.
Just days after their deaths, Crystal Owen was told about graduated driving licences – already applied in countries such as Australia, New Zealand and Canada – which place restrictions on young, newly qualified drivers while they build up experience.
“I was just in absolute disbelief. When I looked at the actual figures, and how effective it has been in every single country it’s been implemented, I was so angry we still don’t have it here, despite years of discussions,” she said. “I think it’s a no-brainer, it would have saved Harvey’s life and it would have saved so many others.”
Last week, the Batley and Spen Labour MP, Kim Leadbeater, introduced a new bill into parliament that would place restrictions on new drivers for six months, including a zero-alcohol limit, restrictions on night-time driving and controls on the number of passengers they could carry. Research has shown that newly qualified drivers with a car full of passengers of a similar age are four times more likely to be in a fatal crash than when driving alone.
Owen would also like to see learner drivers required to complete a minimum of 40 hours of learning behind the wheel before they are allowed complete free rein on the roads.
“Seven out of 10 crashes involving young drivers are on rural roads. In Harvey’s case, it was a wet rural road and they were on a bend. The speed limit was 60mph but only an experienced driver would know you can’t actually do that,” she said. “The anger isn’t at the driver, he was a young lad, it could have just as easily been Harvey.”
She has started a petition and is working alongside about 90 other families as part of Forget-me-not Families Uniting, a group of families who have lost a young person in a car accident, to rally cross-party support for Leadbeater’s bill. They are being supported by dozens of charities and road organisations including the RAC, AA, Road Peace and Brake.
But Owen is sceptical the bill will pass: it could face fierce opposition from people who argue it would take away rights and freedoms from young people, and would be difficult to police.
“I understand young people’s rights are important. They say it’s an impingement on their freedom, yet what bigger impingement on their freedom is their loss of life?” she said.
“Almost all road safety precautions that are in place are self-policed anyway. Of course it’s not going to stop 100% of these crashes. But most of them are not caused from people being deliberately stupid, they are caused by inexperience. It would remind young people they need to take extra precautions.”
There would be exemptions for work, medical and emergency reasons, she said. Other benefits would be reducing insurance premiums for young drivers, and helping reinforce parental guidance on road safety.
Owen said Harvey had told her he was going to Wales with friends, but she was misled to believe a parent was driving them, and she had no idea they intended to go camping. “He wasn’t a bad lad. But he’s a teenager. So they’re going to twist the truth sometimes just to get their freedom. And there’s no way you can monitor a teenager 24 hours of the day,” she said. “He couldn’t see the risks himself.”
She initially had concerns the day after the boys left, when a WhatsApp message was left unread. She started calling their friends to ask if anyone had heard from them, but was told they most likely just didn’t have a phone signal.
“Everyone basically said, ‘They’re in Wales for goodness sake, they’ve got no signal, we can’t get hold of any of them’. They all just made out that I was so over the top and I just needed to calm down and he’s fine,” she said. “It was the next day when they were supposed to come home that I called the police.”
She was told to remain at home rather than travel to Wales, so that she would definitely have a phone signal if Harvey called. She set a timer on her phone to call the police every 30 minutes for an update. But she couldn’t wait, and drove to Snowdonia. “That’s when the panic kicked in. It’s so vast, I just couldn’t see how we would ever find them,” she said.
In the end, the boys’ car was spotted by a lorry driver who was high enough to see over trees covering the view to a ditch swollen with water. A postmortem concluded the four had drowned.
The news of the boys’ death left Owen in “absolute disbelief”. She couldn’t get out of bed for weeks and her business, a cake shop in Shrewsbury, was completely forgotten about. “My passion from my business has now gone completely,” she said. “You do everything for your kids and to make a better life for them, and then to think that it can all just disappear in the blink of an eye.”
Owen has thrown herself into campaigning for greater awareness about road risks, and hopes the new bill could be the first step towards cutting the number of young people dying – they make up a fifth of all people killed or seriously injured on the roads in the UK.
“Even if this law gets passed, it’s never going to bring Harvey back. But I know I can’t sit back when there’s such an easy solution to stop so many of these deaths,” she said.
