Road Safety Bill [HL]

I wish to speak to Amendments Nos. 78 and 79, which are grouped with Amendment No. 77. The first amendment deals with the issue of speed limits in villages. I do not intend to take up the time of the Committee in arguing the case for 30 miles per hour speed limits in built-up areas. I believe we would all agree that the arguments are very well known. Incidentally, I do not know whether noble Lords have seen the department’s latest advert which I saw in a cinema last night. It shows a young child, who is dead because the vehicle which hit her was travelling at 40   miles per hour. It then goes on to explain that the child would have had a good chance of survival had the vehicle which hit her been travelling at 30 miles per hour. It is an extremely powerful and moving argument. I do not believe we need to dwell today on the case for a 30 miles per hour limit in villages. At the launch of the   Government’s Road Safety Strategy in April 2001, the Prime Minister said that 30 miles per hour should be   the norm in villages. So, in a sense, the amendments and the debate today relate to the process by which we achieve this and not to the limit itself. I speak on the issue because when I was first elected a county councillor, in Suffolk, we became the first county in the country to introduce 30 miles per hour speed limits in all villages. That came about because many of us who campaigned in the 1993 elections were struck by the repeated requests, from right around the county, for 30   miles per hour speed limits. These were from rural communities who felt that their quality of life was being blighted by traffic which was, quite legitimately, travelling through their villages at 60 miles per hour. So, in 1993, the incoming Suffolk administration determined that all villages who wanted to have a speed limit would have one—but in looking into that, we realised just what a highly intensive, slow and expensive process it was going to be. The system of consultation—making and advertising the orders, placing the signs, and so on—is, indeed, extremely time-consuming. We decided to organise the county into batches; in that way, we could get some economies of scale through the process. However, we did realise that it would be very expensive, and at that time local authorities were beginning to be really cash-strapped. At that point, we hit upon a wheeze which I can now explain to noble Lords, since it does not matter any more. At the time, it rather saved our bacon. An on-the-ball county treasurer spotted that the mechanism for funding local government at that time, the SSA, was, in part at least, down to how many miles of urban road we had in our county. For those purposes, an urban road was defined as one which had a 30 miles per hour speed limit on it. So, in Suffolk’s case, we accelerated the programme—and it paid for itself extremely quickly. Unfortunately, they caught on to that one, but we had managed to get ahead of the game. All of that explains, I suspect, why nowadays fewer than one in five local authorities have a policy similar to Suffolk’s, where all villages have speed limits. The new policy, then—as proposed in the amendment—would do a great deal to reduce the current bureaucracy and inconsistency involved in determining 30 miles per hour speed limits on a case-by-case basis. It is not removing local choice because locals have no choice now; they have a 60 miles per hour limit unless they have street lighting, or unless the local authority is prepared to go through the process. The change is simply in the default speed limit. We are saying that in the absence of street lighting, or being signed otherwise, that the current 60 miles per hour limit is inappropriate and should be changed. The second amendment to which I wish to speak, Amendment No. 79, concerns speed limits in country lanes. On the basis that it is unusual to have primary legislation in Parliament on road safety—this is the first we have had for quite some time—we should take the opportunity to address the problem of rural roads, particularly single-carriageway roads. I noticed that in a reply to the noble Baroness, Lady Byford, on 28 June that, of the 3,508 people killed in road accidents in 2003, 2,065 were killed on rural roads. That is simply not acceptable; it is the one area where the situation is getting worse, not better. There is a coalition, from the Motorists’ Forum through to CPRE and Transport 2000, which is much in favour of tackling the problems of speeding on country lanes. They feel that the current limit of 60 miles per hour on many rural roads is simply too fast. The problem has always been to find a way in which one could reduce the speed limit on a country lane that would be acceptable to motorists while not filling the countryside with clutter. The beauty of the amendment which has been tabled in my name and that of other noble Lords is that it would enable the speed limit to be reduced to 40 on narrow lanes without white lines, which would be a more appropriate speed limit. A major campaign would clearly be needed for drivers to understand the new limit—but once that is done, we would have no need for signs throughout the country.