New £3m road safety plan ‘fails to protect children’
A FURIOUS row has erupted within Manchester town hall about which schools in the city should get new road safety crossings.
Labour councillors have privately responded with outrage after a list of locations proposed for the first phase in a £3m wave of investment failed to include any of the serious accident black spots highlighted in the latest available data.
They believe the plans have failed to prioritise those schools where children are facing the most danger.
Councillors are particularly angry that bosses have not yet compiled any up-to-date accident figures for 2017 or 2018, or apparently referred to those already available up to the end of 2016 when drawing up the crossings programme.
One senior councillor raged that the list of schools ‘makes no sense.’
The proposed measures are included in a report going before the town hall’s economy scrutiny committee today, suggesting 34 schools across the city should be prioritised for new crossings this year. It says the selection is based partly on ‘delivering as many schemes as possible’ and partly on ‘where high risk sites have been identified.’
However none of the 15 schools that recorded ‘serious’ accidents between 2014 and 2016 – according to data provided to a council’s own road safety sub-committee last September – are in the programme, including Claremont Primary in Moss Side, which recorded two such incidents in that period. Crossacres Primary in Wythenshawe, where two children were knocked down in March, is not mentioned either.
Councillors are also angry that William Hulme Grammar School in Whalley Range has ‘jumped’ onto the list.
A further 23 schools that had not recorded any accidents in the two years to 2016 are also in the programme’s first phase, while 38 of the 48 that did – albeit more minor collisions – are not.
One senior councillor said: “None of it makes any sense. We’ve got £3m. Why are we not using it to make children safer? It’s going to kick off at the meeting.”
A second furious senior councillor said the row was not about whether or not individual members saw work done in their own wards, but about those schools facing the greatest danger receiving the measures necessary.
“The criteria has always been if it’s a danger or already a crossing patrol. They haven’t done any work whatsoever on the schools that are the most dangerous.”
Several councillors also said some information contained in the report going to committee – including about which schools already have 20mph zones outside and which wards they are in – was inaccurate, while also pointing out that the only full data included in it relates to parking enforcement.
The report does not list exactly how each of the first schools chosen was selected. But a raft of data provided on traffic enforcement does list the hot spots in the city for parking violations outside schools, showing the number of fines issued in April and May this year.
Oswald Road Primary in Chorlton tops it, at 41 parking tickets, followed by Withington High School for Girls, Birchfields Primary in Rusholme and Crossacres in Wythenshawe.
Executive member for the environment, planning and transport, Coun Angeliki Stogia, said: “All schools have been assessed by our education department to identify their safety rating, on a ‘red-amber-green’ basis. This has allowed us to determine what measures are required to move each school to the ‘green’ low risk category.”