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Lord Bradshaw: My Lords, I am sorry but I do not feel particularly reassured because the number of traffic police has been significantly run down and the investigations that they undertake into accidents, especially fatal accidents, are almost always done in
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discharging their duties as coroners' officers and rarely lead to a prosecution because the person has often killed themselves in the process. I find the reply rather complacent in view of the huge numbers of people killed on the roads. I remind the noble Lord, Lord Renton, that it was never my intention for this to become law. This is a probing amendment. However, I wish that the Government will set in train a mechanism for formalising more their approach to road accidents. The accident rate will not be reduced as we wish unless they do so. With that, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Amendment, by leave, withdrawn
Baroness Scott of Needham Market moved Amendment No. 3:
"NATIONAL SPEED LIMIT FOR VILLAGES
(1) There shall be a national speed limit of 30 miles per hour for villages.
(2) A "village" for the purposes of this Act shall be a settlement of 20 or more houses located along more than 600 metres of the highway.
(3) The limit referred to under subsection (1) shall come into force twelve months after the day on which this Act is passed."
The noble Baroness said: The amendment would improve road safety by reducing speed limits in rural areas. I remind the House that rural roads are the one category of road in which there has been no improvement in the accident rate. Amendment No. 3 would introduce the national default speed limit of 30 miles an hour in English villages. Ministers from the Prime Minister downwards have repeatedly said that 30 miles an hour should be the normal speed limit in villages. Indeed, in Committee—which was a long time ago now—the noble Baroness, Lady Crawley, said that 30 miles an hour in villages was government policy. So I do not intend to argue the case for 30 mile an hour speed limits in built-up areas because the correlation between speed and accidents is well understood, as is their impact on the quality of life of particular communities.
All urban communities have the security of knowing that their streets will be protected by a default 30 mph speed limit. So why on earth do we not give the same level of protection to rural residents who live in villages as a matter of course?
Despite having argued that 30 miles an hour in villages is government policy, the Government unfortunately have no record of action to back that up. No target date was set for when 30 mile an hour limits should be achieved. There are no government data on how many villages in this country do or do not have speed limits. There have been no additional financial resources to make this policy a reality and there is nothing in local transport plan guidance about such speed limits.
The Council for the Protection of Rural England has carried out a survey of English county councils to ascertain how far they were able to introduce such a policy. The results show that the introduction of individual 30 mile an hour speed limits on a case-by-case basis costs around £6,000 per time. It is therefore
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not surprising that demand is outstripping supply. Many councils have reported that they receive requests for speed limits on an almost weekly basis. Buckinghamshire has reported that it still has 100 villages with a default 60 mile an hour speed limit. Cambridgeshire believes that it will be 2027 before it reaches the end of its speed limit waiting list.
Amendment No. 3 therefore seeks to facilitate what is already government policy. In this I wish to be helpful to the Government. The amendment does not remove the discretion of local communities to have a different speed limit if that is what seems appropriate. It would be a matter for them to move from a 30 mile an hour limit to something else. The change would be from the default of 60 miles an hour. For that reason, the amendment has the support of the National Association of Local Councils, which sees it as entirely beneficial. It also has the backing of 29 organisations which make up the Safer Streets Coalition. I beg to move.
Lord Hanningfield: My Lords, I totally support the principle of villages having a 30 mph and perhaps even a 20 mph speed limit in certain circumstances. However, I also believe that it is up to that village to decide what speed limits it wants. My own village is about two miles long—it is a small village but is long and stretched out with just a few houses—and has a 40 mph speed limit for each end of it and a 30 mph speed limit in the middle. I know that the noble Baroness, Lady Scott, said that at the moment there is a 60 mph rule anyway, and that some local authorities still have a waiting list, but in the majority of counties where there are villages, there are already speed limits of one kind or other, designed by the local people.
As with the last amendment, I believe that we have a habit in Parliament of wanting to create too much central direction all the time. I am trying as much as possible to move it back to local decision-making processes, and I believe that this issue is one that a village should decide for itself, without any change in the national law. Let villages decide what their speed limits should be—and I, being involved in a local authority, will do what I can to facilitate what villages want, as I know that police and other people do. As long as government supports what villages want, that is the best way in which to do it, rather than changing the law as it is.
Viscount Tenby: My Lords, I support the amendment. In previous discussions on the matter, the Minister took the view that councils should decide on it. I understand that he shares the objective. I do not want to traduce him; that is the last thing that I want to do, because he is conspicuously fair himself, but the fact of the matter is that if you allow such a laissez-faire approach, most of it will not get done at all. Just one or two councils, such as the efficient ones that we have in the east of England, will do something about it, but the majority of them will not.
The fact is that villages are extremely vulnerable areas with indifferent lighting, appalling pavements and other traffic hazards; they are full of children,
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infirm people, animals and the elderly. That latter fact alone must surely commend itself to this House, above anything else. I ask noble Lords to support the amendment.
Lord Berkeley: My Lords, I support the amendment, too. We have talked about it many times in your Lordships' House. It is no big deal to slow down to 30 mph in a village; I do not know why people get so upset about it, because it ought to be the normal thing to do under the definition in the amendment.
I was interested in the noble Baroness's estimate that it would cost £6,000 a village. It is interesting to compare that with the Government's figure for the cost of a fatality, which is about £1.25 million. The cost that I was given in a Written Answer last year of the costs of death and delay on the A34, that wonderful dual carriageway that goes past Oxford, was about £300 million. We are not talking about spending big money here; if the proposal saves a few lives—and prevents not just deaths but injuries as well—it deserves every support.
Earl Attlee: My Lords, I cannot support the amendment. First, I believe that local authorities can impose appropriate speed limits, but I was interested to hear what the noble Baroness said about the difficulties for local authorities in getting approval for those speed limits. The Minister needs to look at that.
What happens if all or most of the houses in a village are on one side of the road? There is very little risk of pedestrians crossing the road. What happens if the road is a dual carriageway, with or without a service road? Default speed limits drafted in this way could have most peculiar results. For instance, the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, cannot understand why people are so upset about 30 mph speed limits, but the main A15 road goes right through the edge of my local village and through several other villages. It has a 40 mph speed limit through those villages already; if it had to have a 30 mph speed limit, first, there would be a difficulty in compliance, because motorists would get rather fed up. We must be careful not to keep imposing unrealistic speed limits that are flouted by everyone. In addition, if it were necessary to have 30 mph speed limits in villages on trunk roads, we would have to start building more bypasses, because you would not be able to get around large pasts of the country—particularly the east of England, where I come from. So while I understand the problem to which the noble Baroness referred of getting approval for a speed limit, I cannot support a blanket speed limit.
3.45 pm
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