20MPH: Reform says scrap it after serious injuries hit a six-year high. Here is what the figures actually show

Reform Wales has called for the default 20mph speed limit to be scrapped after figures showed the number of people killed or seriously injured on Welsh roads reached a six-year high.

Jason O’Connell, the party’s shadow cabinet minister for economy and transport, said the policy had cost millions to introduce and was “costing lives”.

“These figures raise serious questions about Labour and Plaid’s failed approach and their justification for forcing roads down to 20mph,” he said.

He called the limit “a colossal waste of taxpayers’ money”, said it was set to cost up to £9 billion in damage to the Welsh economy, and said Reform would scrap it.

The figure behind the claim comes from the Department for Transport, which recorded 1,361 people killed or seriously injured on Welsh roads in 2025, the highest since 2019.

The figure covers every road in Wales

That total takes in every road at every speed limit, from cul-de-sacs to motorways. It does not separate the roads the 20mph policy changed from those it left alone.

Senedd Research, the Welsh Parliament’s own research service, made that split in March. It found collisions on Welsh 20 and 30mph roads fell 22.5% between spring 2023 and the end of 2024, while collisions on other Welsh roads were almost flat.

Casualties of all severities on those roads fell 23.8% in Wales. In England, where 20mph limits are set locally rather than by default, the equivalent fall was 5.2%.

On figures adjusted for changes in how injuries are recorded, deaths and serious injuries on 20 and 30mph roads fell 17.4%, while rising 7.4% on roads of 40mph and above. Senedd Research said most of that increase came from Dyfed-Powys changing its reporting system.

Deaths rose, and remain below 2022

Welsh Government figures show 91 people were killed on Welsh roads in 2025, seven more than in 2024. That is fewer than the 96 killed in 2022, the last full year before the change, and the government says fatal collisions have been broadly stable since 2010.

Casualties of all severities totalled 4,078, up 2% on 2024 but 8% below 2022. Traffic is at the highest level ever recorded in Wales. The same pattern appeared last year, when crashes crept up while staying below pre-20mph levels.

Reform has made this argument before

The £9 billion is not a new figure. Reform MS Laura Anne Jones put the same number to the First Minister in the Senedd in March, calling the policy “a disaster from start to finish”.

Then First Minister Eluned Morgan rejected it, pointing to a 22% fall in police-recorded collisions in Wales against 4% in England, and to insurers cutting premiums. “There are children walking around Wales today who would not have been if it weren’t for this policy,” she said.

Jones made an argument Reform’s latest statement leaves out, that casualties have fallen across the UK because cars are getting safer.

She also drew a line the new statement does not. “No one across this Chamber disagrees that 20mph should be the case outside schools and hospitals and where it is appropriate,” she said, before calling for the default to go.

The £9 billion

The figure is the top of a range. The Welsh Government’s explanatory memorandum put the cost of longer journey times at £6.4 billion over 30 years, with “significant uncertainty” and a range of £2.7 billion to £8.9 billion.

The same assessment put the net cost at £4.5 billion once safety and health benefits were counted, and the government puts implementation at around £32 million. It now concedes there has been academic debate about how travel time was costed. Ministers frame the trade-off as about a minute on the average journey against up to nine lives saved a year.

What it looks like on local roads

Councils here have been unpicking parts of the policy for over a year. Swansea identified 17 roads to return to 30mph out of 81 put forward by the public, and Carmarthenshire settled on 11.

Neath Port Talbot went the other way. With 92% of its roads reduced to 20mph and 36 exceptions left at 30mph, officers ruled out any further changes after assessing the routes residents and councillors raised.

In Pembrokeshire, where the council ran a listening exercise before reviewing limits settlement by settlement, casualties on 20 and 30mph roads fell from 125 to 89.

Compliance is another matter. Gors Avenue at Dewi Terrace in Townhill recorded 4,340 speeding offences in a year, the third highest of any road in South Wales, and it is a 20mph stretch. Waunarlwydd, Llangyfelach Road and Mumbles Road at Blackpill were also in the top 20.

Feeling about the limit has run hot enough to produce criminal cases. The Llangyfelach Road camera was cut down with an angle grinder and its replacement daubed in red paint. In Bridgend, a van driver was given a suspended sentence for punching a 69-year-old in the face after the man stuck to a 20mph limit, leaving him with a fractured cheekbone and eye socket.

The politics have already moved

Reform describes the limit as introduced by Labour and Plaid through the co-operation agreement. It was in both parties’ 2021 manifestos and the government’s programme for government, and the Senedd approved it in July 2022. Plaid members voted for it and against repeal, and Wales now has a Plaid-led government.

The policy’s architect has counted the cost. Lee Waters, the former transport minister who drove the law through, said in May that it “came at a price” after Labour fell to nine seats behind Plaid on 43 and Reform on 34. “It’s achieved great things, but it’s come at a price,” he said.

Transport for Wales says at least three years of collision data are needed to judge the policy properly. The full evaluation is not due to report until 2029.