ROCHDALE ROAD, SOWERBY (SPEED LIMIT) (Hansard, 4 May 1953)

§ Mr. Douglas Houghton (Sowerby)
I regret having to impose further burdens on the Parliamentary Secretary after the very tiring time he has had recently, but he has a very resilient personality and, in any case, he has the satisfaction of knowing that there is a form of allocation of time order which will bring this debate to an end 30 minutes from now. I promise him that I will give him enough time to say how much he agrees with me.
The matter which I have to raise concerns a stretch of road in my constituency 169 of just over 1,000 yards which lies between Sowerby Bridge and the village of Triangle. This road comes within the provisions of Section 1 of the Road Traffic Act, 1934. That is to say it is a road on which there is a system of street lighting furnished by means of lamps placed not more than 200 yards apart. Were it not for a direction which has been issued to say that this portion of the Rochdale Road shall not be a restricted area for speed limit purposes, it would fall under the provisions which I have referred to. But a derestriction order was issued some time ago, the exact date of which I have not been able to discover, but no doubt long before the war. This road is part of the main road between Halifax and Rochdale and is a very busy main road taking considerable through traffic as well as a bus service.
It is this stretch of road lying between the restricted area of Sowerby Bridge and the restricted area of Triangle that I am asking the Parliamentary Secretary to withdraw from the derestriction order which stands upon it. Who is it that wants the speed limit imposed on this stretch of road? First of all the residents in a small estate of prefabricated temporary houses which lies alongside this road. I have in my hand a petition signed by 22 of the householders whose houses lies alongside the part of this road running from Sowerby Bridge to Triangle.
The Accident Prevention Council, consisting of a number of motorists, has also supported the demand for the imposition of the speed limit. The Sowerby Bridge Urban District Council is another of the bodies which lends strong support to this request and they have made representations to the West Riding County Council who on 5th February this year passed a motion supporting the representations of the Urban District Council.
There we have the residents on the thoroughfare, the Accident Prevention Council, the Sowerby Bridge Urban District Council and the West Riding County Council all united in asking for the speed limit to be imposed. Why do these bodies want this stretch of road restricted? What sort of road is it? I have described it already as being just over 1,000 yards of main road, fairly straight, lying between two restricted 170 areas. It has a carriageway of between 24 and 27 feet.
Years ago a single track tramway ran down the road, which indicates that it was not of a width which would conveniently take a double track tramway. There is a footpath on one side of the road between four and five feet in width but with a very low kerb offering little resistance to traffic which might swing out and go near the kerb in passing other vehicles. There is a narrow grass verge on the other side of the road, but that can scarcely be called a footpath.
The chief danger of traffic unrestricted in speed on this stretch of road is to the children of the householders in the small estate of temporary houses, all of whom have to walk along the comparatively narrow footpath to go to school in the village of Triangle. That means that they have roughly 1,000 yards to walk to school with a busy stream of traffic both ways, including many heavy vehicles, and, especially as there is a bus service along the route, with a tendency for the faster vehicles to pass the slower ones. The Sowerby Bridge Urban District Council have said that in their views on the matter pedestrians do not feel safe along the road, particularly when the air impact from an omnibus or coach hits them, and they stress the fact that the road was originally restricted under the Road Traffic Act.
Who is against the wishes of the bodies to whom I have referred? First of all, there is the divisional road engineer who rejected the representations of the West Riding County Council and said in a letter dated 23rd December, 1952: I note that there has been no change in the built-up conditions and in the circumstances it is considered that the grounds are insufficient to recommend that the 30 m.p.h speed limit should be re-established. He goes on: In arriving at the above decision, regard has been paid to the views of the Chief Constable and also to the details of accidents which you have supplied. He goes on to mention that two of the four accidents which have occurred in the last two years have involved vehicles which were already conditioned to speeds of not more than 30 m.p.h. and he suggests that it is open to question whether having a speed limit on the road would have made any difference.
171 Supporting the divisional road engineer is the Parliamentary Secretary. I am obliged to him for two letters of full explanation, one dated 26th March and the other 14th April, in which he says that, after very careful consideration, he is unable to recommend his right hon. Friend to re-impose the speed limit. The grounds upon which the Parliamentary Secretary comes to his conclusion are, first of all, the absence of any accident record which gives rise to concern, though he specially points out in his letter that accident record by itself is by no means the only criterion, that it is one of the matters but by no means the most important of them which is to be taken into account. I am grateful for that assurance, because local residents are inclined to feel that they cannot get a speed limit imposed until more accidents have taken place, and it would be a pity if citizens felt that there had to be more accidents before the adequate precautions had to be taken.
Another thing that the Parliamentary Secretary says is that he cannot agree that this is a built-up area. It is true that it is not as built-up as the thoroughfare within the urban district of Sowerby Bridge or the main street of the village of Triangle—it lies between the two— but there are houses scattered over this road and especially concentrated in the area to which I have referred, where 17 houses have been built close together, all of which are occupied by families with young children. He also says that the policy of the Minister must be to maintain some uniformity of treatment throughout the country as between roads of similar types and not have a restricted area in one place and a derestricted area in another, where roads are similar in type and the traffic is comparable.
I want to draw his attention to the fact that within my own constituency there is a stretch of road for two miles long where a speed limit has been imposed and where housing density along this road is less than along the road that I am now discussing. I refer to the road between Mytholmroyd and Blackstone Edge. I walked along the road this week-end to see for myself. I have been along it many times, but I wanted to refresh my mind as to the sort of road it is. It is a little difficult to see how a speed limit 172 can be justified on that road if it is not justified on the stretch of road between Sowerby Bridge and Triangle, especially since the Sowerby Bridge-Triangle Road is the busier road for traffic and more dangerous in my opinion for pedestrians.
So I ask the Parliamentary Secretary if he will be good enough to look again at this matter. At all events, if he cannot impose a speed limit on the whole stretch of the road, he certainly ought to take care that the speed limit is imposed on that part of it which lies alongside this congregation of prefabricated houses to which I have referred. I am not making these representations to the Parliamentary Secretary without having gone into the matter very closely myself, inspected this stretch of road and other roads in the vicinity, and after listening to the representation of different shades of thought on the matter and on them assuring me that the desire for a speed limit on this road is very strong indeed and that we cannot see that the inconvenience to traffic on the stretch of 1,000 yards can outweigh the consideration of road safety to pedestrians, especially the children who have to use it.

The Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Transport (Mr. Gnrney Braithwaite)
The hon. Member for Sowerby (Mr. Houghton) need not apologise for bringing me to the House on this occasion. I always feel that these Adjournment debates are of the greatest value, and it is a good thing that Ministers should be made answerable for many of these administrative actions. I am grateful to the hon. Member for the moderate way in which he has put his case this evening, and I will do my best to deal with it as fully as I can in the limited period that I have for the purpose.
I must make it plain that I have already had correspondence with the hon. Gentleman about this matter and have explained the views of my right hon. Friend at considerable length. I will try to put the case again, but it is difficult to say much more than I have already written to the hon. Gentleman.
I must first inform the House as to the point of principle involved. Our policy in matters of speed limits is governed by the Road Traffic Act, 1934, which provided 173 for restriction to be applied to roads in built-up areas, and it is the responsibility of my right hon. Friend to ensure as far as possible that this policy is applied throughout the country with as great a degree of uniformity as can be contrived. The observance of the general speed limit now falls a good way short of the ideal in almost every area which one may observe. We think it likely that one of the reasons for this attitude is that motorists see restriction signs on so many roads throughout the country which appear to them to be far from built-up. For this reason, in all speed limit cases, although we give every consideration to local representations, we must have general regard to the interests of road users.
The hon. Gentleman will recall that we had a useful debate on this general question last year when we were taking the Committee stage of the Expiring Laws (Continuance) Bill in which he took part. I will repeat some words I said then because they put the case succinctly. I said: It is our view that one of the surest methods of allowing respect for the speed limit to diminish further would be to allow roads to remain subject to the restriction when there is no justification for it. We therefore encourage, quite deliberately, the making of de-restriction orders in such cases, although hon. Members wil realise that local opinion is liable to be hostile to any such proposal."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 2nd December, 1952; Vol. 508, c. 1377.] As the hon. Gentleman told us, the section of road to which he now calls our attention is just over 1,000 yards in length on A.58 and was de-restricted by an order confirmed on 18th May, 1936, two years after the passage of the statute which governs these matters. The Urban Council of Sowerby Bridge decided to re-open the question in October, 1951–18 months ago—and since then, at our request, the divisional road engineer of the Ministry has made a special investigation into this case.
I hope that the hon. Gentleman does not remain of the opinion that we are only prepared seriously to consider an application for a speed limit if a casualty has occurred. I think he realises that, but I stress it because there is a good deal of misconception on this matter. Obviously the accident record is a factor which must be taken into consideration, but we should not regard the existence or absence of an 174 accident record as conclusive evidence one way or the other.
On the one hand, in our experience many accidents are entirely irrelevant to the question of whether a speed limit should be imposed or not, and the statistics prove that many accidents involve heavy goods vehicles which are already subject to a 20-mile limit. On the other hand, however, we should consider it right to impose a limit even on a stretch of road which had been completely free from accidents if we regarded it as being properly built-up.
I now come to the report of the divisional engineer on this length of road. He confirms what the hon. Member has told us—that it is practically straight, with a carriageway of between 24 and 27 feet wide and on one side a footpath of between 4 and 5 feet and on the other a narrow unpaved verge which could be used by pedestrians. But I agree with him that it is by no means ideal for that purpose. There is a prefabricated housing estate on a short length of the north-west side placed off the main road behind a service road, but otherwise there is little frontage development, and only scattered development of the adjacent back areas.
I wish to be frank about this and I will give the House the latest accident picture, although this is only repeating what I said in my letter to the hon. Member. I hope he will take it against the background of what I have just said that the accident record is by no means conclusive in this matter. In 1950, an accident involving serious injury occurred owing to defective brakes on a pedal cycle. In that year, four accidents occurred which resulted in slight injuries and in two of which pedestrians were involved. In one a pedestrian was masked by a stationary vehicle and in the other a pedestrian stepped into the roadway in front of a lorry, which, of course, was subject to a speed limit of 20 miles an hour. In 1951, 1952 and 1953 to date, I am glad to be able to inform the House that no injury accident has been reported.
For the purposes of the record, I should say that although the hon. Member told us that the West Riding County Council had passed a resolution asking for the re-imposition of this restriction, that is not my information. My information is that 175 it was the appropriate committee, presumably the highways committee, which passed the resolution—

§ Mr. Houghton
I beg the pardon of the hon. Gentleman. It was the highways committee.

Mr. Braithwaite
—and it has not yet been endorsed by the full council. I think that is important, although I do not want to quibble about it. Even if it had been endorsed, there are other factors which in our opinion weigh in the scale in the other direction. We have consulted the local police about this matter and my information is that the chief constable is of the opinion that the re-imposition of the speed limit on this length of road could not be justified. I need hardly say that we naturally lean heavily on his opinion.
I am sorry that I have to send the hon. Member away empty-handed at this time, but I can assure him that, as a 176 result of his representations, we have looked into this question with extreme thoroughness. I am afraid I have to tell him that the road cannot be considered as built-up within the meaning of the Act of 1934. That is the real obstacle with which I am confronted, and in view of all the considerations which I have outlined tonight, I have to say that I cannot advise my right hon. Friend to change his mind. But should the situation change and building expand, and there be more houses along this stretch of road, I hope that the hon. Member will not feel precluded by anything I have said tonight from approaching us again on this subject. Should it come within the definition of a built-up area, obviously the time would come to reconsider the question.