Speaking in this afternoon’s Welsh Conservative debate calling on the Welsh Government to repeal its default 20mph speed limit, North Wales MS Mark Isherwood stressed that since it was introduced last September, it has been hugely unpopular and failed to provide a sanctuary of safety on our roads.
Mr Isherwood said “determined to pursue its road safety policies, the Welsh Government ignored all inconvenient evidence to the contrary” and implemented the new limit regardless.
He referred to the strong public opposition to the speed limit, where 469,571 people signed the Senedd petition calling for it to be scrapped, the largest petition in the Senedd’s history, and stressed that a YouGov poll last month showed that seven in ten Welsh people still oppose it.
Speaking in the debate, he said:
“To say that the indiscriminate 20mph speed limit has been unpopular would be an understatement.
“469,571 people signed the Senedd petition: 'We want the Welsh Government to rescind and remove the disastrous 20mph law’, the largest petition in the Senedd’s history, and Welsh local authorities have received requests for thousands of roads to revert from 20mph to 30mph.
“A separate petition launched in Buckley, Flintshire, the North Wales 20mph pilot area, reached nearly 86,000 signatures.
“A survey of North Wales Live readers found that just 12% of respondents support Labour’s plans to change the default speed limit in residential areas to 20mph, with 88% opposing the plans.
“ When the Welsh Government’s 20mph default speed limits were put to the people in September 2023, opposition was 61%.
“Just two months later, in December 2023 a YouGov/ITV Wales poll found that opposition had risen to 70%.
“With the 1-year anniversary of implementation of the 20mph legislation in Wales approaching, a YouGov poll last month showed that seven in ten Welsh people still oppose this.”
He added:
“In June, the Cabinet Secretary for Transport and North Wales issued a Written Statement in which he said that new road collision data ‘shows that casualties have reduced on roads since the introduction of the new 20 mph speed limits in September last year’.
“What he didn’t say was that the new data he quoted, for the last three months of 2023, compared with the same period in 2022, actually showed that, even with the limited exceptions to default 20 mph limits applied by Local Authorities acting in accordance with Welsh Government exceptions criteria, the number of people killed or seriously injured on 20 mph roads had risen by 800 per cent, from under 5 per cent to 36 per cent of the total, whilst the number killed or seriously injured on 30 mph roads had fallen by 88 per cent, from 49 per cent to just 5 per cent of the total, with the numbers of motorcyclists and cyclists killed and seriously injured both increasing.
“Further, overall road casualties had increased by over 13 per cent.
“Although the Welsh Government has called recent figures showing a 17% fall in people killed or seriously injured on 20mph and 30mph roads in the first six months after the limit was introduced ‘encouraging’, they fail to mention that the number killed or seriously injured on 20 mph roads had risen from 4 per cent to 34 per cent of the total, despite their repeated assurances that 20mph roads would provide a sanctuary of safety, whilst the number on 30 mph roads had fallen from 47 per cent to just 6 per cent of the total, or to mention that the overall number of people killed or seriously injured on our roads is up 10%.
“Before the default 20mph limit came into force, I warned that switching 30mph limits to 20mph limits would transfer the share of road casualties from one to the other, whilst also displacing drivers and therefore road casualties onto the wider road network, and this data demonstrates that this is happening.”
