Richard Foord

It is an honour to serve with you in the Chair, Ms Jardine. I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Chester South and Eddisbury (Aphra Brandreth), not just for securing this debate, but for speaking powerfully and sensitively on this delicate subject; I offer my condolences to the family who she represents. If only the incident that the hon. Lady described was unique, but it is not—it is sadly multiplied many times across the country. According to the charity Brake, five children are seriously injured or killed on UK roads every day. In south-west England, 442 children were injured on roads near schools in just one year—an utterly unacceptable situation. I will use my limited time today to talk about prevention and one town that I represent, Ottery St Mary, where a small intervention, through infrastructure and regulation, could help to prevent accidents and awful consequences in future. In Ottery St Mary, there is a pedestrian bridge, Coleridge bridge, where many schoolchildren can avoid the roads and cross the river—at least, they could. Last year, a tree blew on to the bridge and made it impassable for pedestrians. I looked into why the repair work on that bridge is so slow and discovered that one reason is the Environmental Permitting (England and Wales) Regulations 2016: priority is being given to the salmon spawning season on the River Otter over the safety children going to and from school. I appreciate that the Minister is answering for the Department for Transport and not for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, but she should know that I have written to DEFRA about the issue and had a most unsatisfactory reply about the regulations. I am seeking an exception to the regulations on salmon spawning where the safety of children and vulnerable people is at stake. Coleridge bridge is just one example of a rigid policy designed for another public policy imperative having unintended but serious consequences for public safety. As one Ottery resident put it to me in an email, “do we have to wait for there to be a serious incident involving a child or an elderly resident for prompt action?” It has been over a year, and I understand that no work will begin until at least next summer. Given that our local authority, Devon county council, has the money and is ready to do the work, I urge that we in this place do our job to make the regulations more flexible to look after the safety of young people.