Dear Ms Hyslop

Safer Speeds for Scotland

We are writing to you to highlight a crucial road safety issue that is undermining Scotland’s Road Safety Strategy. Namely the fact that there is no effective enforcement system for Scotland to be able to ensure that safe driving speeds are achieved. 

Given the fundamental importance of safer driving speeds for collision speeds and the resulting casualties, this issue underlies all other efforts to improve driver behaviour. There is no possibility of approaching the ‘Vision Zero’ goal that our governments at UK, Scotland, and local authority levels claim to support, without reform of an enforcement system that is unfit for purpose. 

In Scotland we strongly support the proposed reduction of the national speed limit from 60mph to the more appropriate 50mph on single carriageway roads. This will help to reduce an appalling level of casualties on these roads, especially if followed up with further adjustments to set reduced speed limits that are appropriate to individual road sections. However it will do nothing to ensure that drivers keep to these safer speeds. Without suitably intensified enforcement efforts it is certain that many will not. 

As it stands there are no incentives for either Police Scotland or local authorities to make greater enforcement efforts. All the revenue income arising from fines and penalty charges for speeding currently revert to the UK Treasury, leaving a situation whereby more enforcement requires more expenditure at the expense of the many other pressing priorities for public services. Here in Scotland that income is in effect deducted from Scotland’s block grant, and so is unavailable for any public service purpose in Scotland. There is also no provision for local authorities to assist the police in providing better enforcement. So much for effective devolution of powers to the local levels at which they are needed!

Responding to a question from a Lib. Dem. MP in December, the UK Government minister, Lilian Greenwood, brushed it aside stating there were currently no plans for changes.  

It surely is time for the Scottish Government to demand a system that funds enforcement where it is needed, and at the levels that are needed, through the retention of income from fines and penalties. There is a gaping hole in the devolution of enforcement powers over road safety and it is one which must be fixed. We assume that fixing it commands your support and that of your SNP colleagues in government. So we hope that you will now help in bringing pressure to bear on the UK Government.    

We will also be writing to the UK Secretary of State for Scotland to request his support internally in pressing for this change.       

John Russell

Living Streets Edinburgh Group