How many people have to be seriously injured or killed on Lincolnshire’s roads before our safety partnerships deploy permanent speed enforcement?
As residents on Fleet Road in Fleet can testify, lowering a speed limit means nothing without enforcement.
Despite a recent drop from 40mph to 30mph, a recent traffic survey over 15 days, logged over 12,500 drivers exceeding the limit on this residential stretch, and that is only in one direction!
This will lead to a predictable sequence of serious, multi-vehicle collisions.
Yet, under the rigid, reactive policies of the Lincolnshire Road Safety Partnership (LRSP), village corridors like ours are routinely denied fixed cameras because central budgets are reserved exclusively for high-casualty arterial blackspots.
We are stuck in a macabre bureaucratic loop: communities must wait for a body count to accumulate before they qualify for protection.
It does not have to be this way. Lincolnshire is falling behind progressive national best practices.
Take Bedfordshire, which became the first county in the UK to introduce average speed cameras on local village roads purely to combat anti-social speeding and protect residents’ quality of life.
Crucially, Bedfordshire altered local rules to allow alternative funding. If central police or council budgets are unavailable, local communities can bypass the red tape.
By leveraging Section 106 developer contributions from new housing estates, Community Infrastructure Levies (CIL), or Parish allocations, they can fund the suggested £85,000 installation cost of a baseline average speed camera pair themselves. Once paid for locally, the police step in to process the fines.
This does seem a lot of money, but what price do we put on a person’s life?
An average speed system completely eliminates the dangerous “braking spikes” of old yellow boxes, smoothing traffic flow and permanently calming residential zones.
It is time for Lincolnshire County Council and the LRSP to modernise.
We should not have to trade lives for traffic enforcement.
If our communities are willing to explore creative funding solutions alongside local developers to protect our villages, the county’s policy framework must evolve to let us.
Paul S Barnes
District Councillor – Fleet
Leader of South Holland Independent Group
