Yes, there is support on these benches for introducing 20 mph speed limits. I know, in Aberconwy, it's been a big issue on some of our rural roads, and our local authority found it difficult to actually go from higher speeds to 20 mph. And, of course, our colleague, David Melding MS, has worked so hard on this issue.
It's a common sense and it's a safe move. A person is seven times less likely to die if hit at 20 mph than 30 mph, or 10 times if they're over the age of 60. A study aimed to evaluate the impact of the roll-out of 20 mph speed limits across the city of Bristol found that there had been a reduction in the number of fatal, serious and slight injuries from road traffic collisions equating to estimated cost savings of over £15 million per year, and that walking and cycling across the city had increased. Public Health Wales has previously claimed that there would be significant public health benefits from dropping the limit from 30 mph.
In fact, 20 mph is being pursued and encouraged in other parts of the United Kingdom and abroad. Faversham in Kent is set to become the first town in the UK subject to a town-wide 20 mph speed limit. All residential streets in Southend, Essex will be made 20 mph. Perth city centre's 64 streets have been made 20 mph for the past 18 months. The Road Safety Authority is supporting cross-party agreed plans to limit speeds to 30 mph on almost all roads in Dublin city and suburbs. Milan is setting the same for 22 miles of roads. Washington DC reduced speeds on local roads to 20 mph on 1 June, and Wellington in New Zealand has agreed 30 kmph for central-city streets. As the founder and campaign director of 20's Plenty for Us has commented:
'The de-facto standard for safer and people-friendly streets is now 20mph with higher limits only where they can be justified.'
Action is being taken globally to implement 20 mph, so I'm eager for us to speed up the process here. It simply cannot be right that, whilst it has been possible to introduce 20 mph limits for many years, only around 1 per cent of the urban road network in Wales is currently subject to them. According to the report of the taskforce chaired by Phil Jones, you can change the default speed limit for restricted roads in Wales to 20 mph, and there are a number of recommendations on the steps needed to achieve this, such as having a target date of April 2023 for the change in law coming into effect, making subordinate legislation under sections 81(2) and 65(3) of the Road Traffic Regulation Act 1984, by making additional resources available to local authorities to enable them to consult on, design and implement widespread changes in local speed limits and to provide monitoring data. And that is key—without the resources, it's useless us even talking about it. We need to co-operate with the police and GoSafe to agree how the enforcement regime should be adapted.
I welcome the recommendations of this report and have a particular interest in the calls for the amending of the setting local speed limits guidance. A report I prepared last year, following a very, very heavily-packed public meeting about highways in the west of the Conwy valley, disclosed that local authorities are placing emphasis on the number of accidents, instead of risk and near-misses. This is utter madness, and has meant that we are stuck with high-use, single-track lanes in rural communities such as Tal-y-Cafn, Rowen and Trefriw, and they still have 60 mph limits.
Personally, I believe the guidance and the need to consider 12 distinct factors, not just the numbers and types of collisions, should be enshrined in law so that every local authority has to consider each factor fairly, so that Welsh Government can focus on the serious problems with the guidance on setting local speed limits. We need positive progress on this. So, I welcome the report. Whilst 20 mph would primarily help urban areas, I am clear from my communications on the matter with the First Minister that progress in this area will take us a step closer to help tackling high-risk speed limits in rural areas too. And, as you can see, I've done quite a lot of homework on this, because it's a huge problem and I thank the Government for bringing this forward. Diolch.
