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Road Safety Bill [HL]

My Lords, I cannot support the amendment. First, I believe that local authorities can impose appropriate speed limits, but I was interested to hear what the noble Baroness said about the difficulties for local authorities in getting approval for those speed limits. The Minister needs to look at that. What happens if all or most of the houses in a village are on one side of the road? There is very little risk of pedestrians crossing the road. What happens if the road is a dual carriageway, with or without a service road? Default speed limits drafted in this way could have most peculiar results. For instance, the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, cannot understand why people are so upset about 30 mph speed limits, but the main A15 road goes right through the edge of my local village and through several other villages. It has a 40 mph speed limit through those villages already; if it had to have a 30 mph speed limit, first, there would be a difficulty in compliance, because motorists would get rather fed up. We must be careful not to keep imposing unrealistic speed limits that are flouted by everyone. In addition, if it were necessary to have 30 mph speed limits in villages on trunk roads, we would have to start building more bypasses, because you would not be able to get around large pasts of the country—particularly the east of England, where I come from. So while I understand the problem to which the noble Baroness referred of getting approval for a speed limit, I cannot support a blanket speed limit.