England should adopt 20mph as the default speed limit across its built-up areas, according to a panel of experts who gave evidence to MPs in Parliament this week.
The Transport Committee held the third evidence session of its inquiry into the Government’s road safety strategy on Wednesday, July 15, with the whole hearing given over to speed.
The four witnesses were Adrian Barrett of campaign group 20’s Plenty for Us, former head of the Welsh Government’s 20mph task force and transport planner Phil Jones, Transport for London’s Chief Safety Officer Lily Matson, and pre-hospital critical care doctor Rob Torok. A fifth panellist withdrew.
As we reported ahead of the session , setting local speed limits is currently the job of councils and National Highways. The new strategy commits to updating the guidance on how those limits are decided, but stops short of changing the legal default – a stance every witness argued it should be changed.
All four experts were clear in their support of a blanket 20mph limit in England, arguing that the Government’s target of a 65% reduction in the number of people killed or seriously injured (KSI) will not be possible without it.
Barrett was blunt on why the target won’t be met without it: “Since around 50% of KSIs occur on 30mph roads, without reducing that speed limit down to 20, you simply can’t achieve the target of 65%.”
He added that 20mph was “by far and away the biggest single contributor” available to the Government, worth an estimated 10-15% on its own.
The others agreed a default was the way to get there. Jones said a national default like Wales’s would be “clearly a more ambitious step,” while Matson told MPs that “making the policy on 20mph clear and default in urban areas would be probably the most important thing that they need to lead on.”
MCN has covered the Welsh experience in detail, including the public backlash, the Government’s subsequent commitment to work with councils on ‘getting the right speed on the right roads,’ and the Motorcycle Industry Association’s view that riding at such low speeds “is not easy and therefore may have made riding a scooter or motorcycle more dangerous.”
But Jones was adamant that the situation in Wales was far rosier than reported and that the public have adopted the changes.
“Whenever you change, people are going to get uncomfortable,” he said. “We saw a petition in Wales at the point of the change. Over 400,000 people signed this… There was an identical petition two years later and it attracted 2378 signatures.”
He added: “There was the view that this was tremendously unpopular. And actually there was a silent majority in Wales that were supporting this, but we had this very loud minority. There was actually reluctance of public authorities to take those steps because of the fear of backlash.”
Jones was also keen to dive into the numbers when it came to Welsh speed limit reversals, and the number of exceptions to the 20mph limit retained by local councils.
“I think the authority with the greatest number of exceptions was in South Wales – I think it’s Blaenau Gwent – 10% of its network was saved at 30mph. Wrexham had the fewest, around 2% of the network.
“Interestingly, Wrexham is the authority that’s probably put the most roads back to 30mph… about 50 roads. But across the 22 local authorities in Wales, the majority have [reverted] five to 10 roads, some have done none at all.
“So it’s really been quite a bit of tinkering. There’s been a li...