Wales' 20mph limit will be seen as right - minister Lee Waters

Lee WatersGetty Images

Lee Waters, pictured at the COP26 climate summit, has spoken of the difficulties of making change happen

By Nick Horton
BBC News

The minister behind Wales' 20mph default speed limit says he feels "battered" by the job but "the tide has turned" on the controversial change.

Lee Waters will quit as transport minister and said "realistically" the next first minister would not want him.

He will leave when either Vaughan Gething or Jeremy Miles is announced as Welsh Labour leader next Saturday.

He said bringing in 20mph "was never going to be perfect" but it will be seen as "the right thing to do".

When he announced his departure last week on X, formerly known as Twitter, Mr Waters wrote: "Over the past 15 years I've spent too much time on Twitter. It stopped being fun a while ago, but now I get a pile of malign comments for even the most innocuous posts."

Getty Images

People have joined marches to protest against the new policy as well as signing a petition

Mr Waters, whose title is deputy minister for climate change, denied on BBC Radio Wales' Sunday Supplement he had decided to leave because of social media, and said it had been "clumsy" of him to link them.

The Llanelli Member of the Senedd said he had "used up all my political capital. And I think that's fine".

The 20mph limit was brought in last September as the default for built-up areas on restricted roads, defined as those with lampposts placed not more than 200 yards (about 180m) apart. Ministers said it would reduce deaths and noise and encourage people to walk or cycle,

But it has been highly controversial, and it led to the largest petition in opposition in the history of the Welsh Parliament.

He went on: "I look at the political cycle and realistically I don't think any incoming first minister is going to want me to stay in transport and I think that's fair enough. So I'm just acknowledging that and accepting that the world moves on."

Some 20mph signs have been defaced, such as this one in Llandudno, Conwy

Asked if he would take another ministerial job, he said: "It depends, to be honest. I've been doing this for five years now and I feel pretty battered by it. It is an exhausting role.

"I'm ambivalent is the honest truth. I want to add value… if I feel there is a way I can… I'm open to an honest conversation, but I'm not obsessed by it."

Mr Waters said people in politics spent too much time "worrying about how they are going to get their next mandate, and not enough time thinking about how they use their current mandate".

He said nobody wanted to talk about how to achieve big changes and climate change targets. "Everybody's happy to talk about the high level principles, but when it comes down to it they run away from it and I didn't want to be like that."

He said he wanted to change the "wiring" of the transport system in areas such as roads, buses, trains, and taxis. He said that, with the support of other ministers, he had achieved "some pretty fundamental reforms… but that will take a while to work through".

The Welsh government has previously announced that it would hold a review of how the 20 mph limit works, which has been backed by the Welsh Labour leadership candidates, Mr Gething and Mr Miles.

It has said that the review will look "at how the new default 20mph speed limit has been implemented", but it was not a review of the policy itself.

Mr Waters was asked about recent comments by First Minister Mark Drakeford that even after the change, England has a higher percentage of 20mph roads than Wales.

Mr Waters said: "Everybody always says it's the fault of the communications and not the policy, don't they, and I don't believe that.

"This was a massive change to culture and practice, and clearly the implementation could always have been better.

He said figures from the Go Safe road safety partnership showed that of 14,874 vehicles monitored in February, a larger proportion were compliant.

"It was never going to be perfect, but the fresh figures again this week show that 97% of people for the second month running are complying with the speed limit.

"Most people are just quietly getting on with it. I know our opposition want to make hay out of it, and there is I think a decreasing number of people who are willing to go along with that.

"We're six months in, I think we've turned the tide. The enforcement figures are good, the support figures are changing, so I'm confident that in time this will be seen to have been to be the right thing to do, but it was never going to be popular in the short term."

Asked about public views of the Welsh government, Mr Waters said: "People say 'we need leadership, we need people to set direction' and then people who do that are accused of being arrogant and not listening. One thing I've learned about this job is that you can't win."

Mr Waters said the Welsh government had been "quite consistent in saying the evidence says this, we want to make decisions for the long term, and we're going to do what we think is right, and then people can make their decision at the ballot box".

This story was updated on 27 March to make it clear that the figures Mr Waters referred to when he said 97% of people were complying with the speed limit were based on a sample of 14,874 cars.

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