Road Safety: West Midlands

Debate between John Slinger and Manuela Perteghella

Tuesday 9th June 2026 Commons Chamber

[Manuela Perteghella]

I fully agree with the hon. Member’s points. With the road safety strategy consultation and review, we have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to make changes to the culture and assess the situation. If we want to reduce deaths and serious injuries on our roads, we need to be bold and make sure that local authorities have better, bolder guidance on interventions for urban as well as rural areas.

For example, every time I ask for cameras, I am told that there have to have been five fatalities. There had been one fatality when I started campaigning for road safety in my village. I could not cross my road with my children—holding a little one by the hand and pushing the pram—so I started campaigning on road safety measures in my village. I was told, “You need to wait for five fatalities before automatic number plate recognition cameras are installed.”

[John Slinger (Rugby) (Lab)]

The hon. Lady is making a compelling speech, much of which resonates with me as the MP for Rugby. I am dealing with constituents and councillors who are concerned about the speed limit on the A426 into Rugby from junction 1 of the M6, which is currently 60 mph. Does the hon. Lady agree that the Government’s new edition of the best practice guidance on setting local speed limits, plans for which were set out in the road safety strategy, cannot come too quickly? We need to ensure that residents and their elected representatives are empowered, but all too often the process seems almost resistant to those voices. As she rightly says, all too often we need the evidence of injury and risk to come first, and that is often too late.

[Manuela Perteghella]

I fully agree with the hon. Gentleman. With the new national road safety strategy we have a real opportunity to ensure that we reduce serious injuries and deaths on the roads. I hope the Government will take into consideration our views and the responses to the consultation, and will ensure that the guidance is updated so that we are not acting after a fatality, because that is too late. It is too late for the families and for the young drivers who might have crashed—it is lives destroyed. Also, we cannot have a speed reduction policy that is based on how fast the cars are travelling, rather than on the dangers they pose to road users, including children walking to school or elderly residents crossing the road to get to the post office, the shop or their GP.

We must identify the risks before lives are lost and intervene accordingly. That is the change in culture that Members have mentioned, and the change in policy that the Government must now commit to. There must be cultural change at council level, too, as currently there is a reactive culture in which interventions are made only if there is a history of road traffic accidents, and locations with recorded collisions, especially collisions resulting in injury, are prioritised. County highways authorities often use the speed that most drivers do not exceed as data to judge whether a road has a speeding problem, but interventions should not be based on how fast drivers are driving. We need a change to the Department for Transport guidance, which also seems to reinforce reactive behaviour, especially on speed limits. I look forward to hearing about that from the Minister.

A constituent in Bidford-on-Avon—one of my villages—told me recently:

“Current analysis shows that 63% of cars exceed the speed limit through the village.”

I raised this situation with the local police force, which told me that 35 mph is the enforceable limit—but why? The charity Brake says that a pedestrian hit at 30 mph has a one in five chance of being killed, rising to one in three if they are hit at 35 mph. Children can be killed at 30 mph, so why are we waiting to enforce at 35 mph instead of 30 mph?