First Minister: 33% fewer collisions on Welsh roads since 20mph
Wales has recorded 1,270 fewer road casualties in the two years since the default 20mph speed limit came into force, the First Minister told the Senedd on Tuesday, as opposition parties renewed calls for the policy to be scrapped.
The figures were cited at First Minister’s Questions by Lee Waters MS (Labour, Llanelli), the former deputy minister for climate change who introduced the 20mph default.
He asked First Minister Eluned Morgan to confirm that councils already held powers to alter speed limits on individual roads without any change to the national default.
Ms Morgan said: “There are children walking around Wales today who would not have been if it weren’t for this policy.”
She told the Senedd collisions had fallen by 33% in 2025 compared to 2023. In the year following implementation, police-recorded collisions on 20mph and 30mph roads in Wales dropped by 22%. On equivalent roads in England over the same period, the drop was 4%.
Mr Waters said councils already had the tools to make local adjustments. “Councils already have the power to alter the speed limit, where it makes sense to do so,” he said. “There’s no need to make an expensive change to the default speed limit to do that.”
In Flintshire, the process is already under way. The council has published a series of Traffic Regulation Orders proposing that more than 20 roads revert to 30mph, including stretches in Buckley, Mold, Sandycroft, Hawarden, Connah’s Quay and Sealand. The proposals are subject to public consultation and objections could see some roads remain at 20mph.
Welsh Conservative MS Laura Anne Jones (South East Wales region) challenged the statistics, arguing that casualty figures had fallen across Britain as cars became safer.
She said the policy had cost the Welsh economy £9 billion by the Welsh Government’s own calculations and called for a reversal ahead of May’s Senedd election.
Ms Morgan rejected the comparison with England. “Let’s deal with facts,” she said. “It’s a 22 per cent reduction in the number of police-recorded collisions in Wales, compared to 4 per cent in England.”
The Welsh Government has not estimated the cost of a full reversal of the default limit. Ms Morgan said any move to reverse it “would incur significant costs not just financially, but in terms of lives lost and injuries caused.”
She also told the Senedd that some insurers had begun reflecting the Welsh collision data in their pricing. “There are insurance companies now who are actually offering a 20 per cent reduction for insurance in Wales as a result of the reductions in claims that they’ve seen,” she said.
Mr Waters said the two-year figures settled the argument. “This is the most significant achievement in road safety in decades,” he said.
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