I’ve spent over sixteen years behind the wheel of an HGV. Five, six days a week, up and down this country’s road network. Not tramping, mind, I go home most nights. But I know Britain’s roads better than most people ever will, and I know exactly what a genuine road safety measure looks like versus what gets dressed up as one.
Birmingham’s proposed blanket 20mph plan is the second kind. I’m calling it what it is: the 20mph scam.
A consultation designed not to be found.
Here’s where it starts. Birmingham City Council has a legal duty to consult residents before rolling out significant speed limit changes across the city. Fine. That’s how it should work.
But ask around. Ask your neighbours, your mates on the school run, the bloke at the corner shop, whether they know a consultation is even happening, and where. Most won’t have a clue.
The process has been buried in council documents, spread across different pages, framed in language that reads like it was written to be skimmed past rather than understood.
I don’t think that’s an accident.
A consultation that’s hard to find and harder to follow doesn’t get participation. Low participation then gets quietly read back as public acceptance. That’s not democracy, that’s a tactic, and it’s one we’ve seen before.
Three petitions, one council that won’t listen.
To their credit, politicians across the spectrum have seen this coming and tried to do something about it. Cllr Shehryar Kayani of the Workers Party of Britain has launched his own petition, calling for a balanced approach: proper road maintenance, evidence-led limits assessed road by road, transparent data, and real consultation before anything further gets imposed. Not anti-safety, just anti-blanket-rule-with-no-evidence-behind-it.
The Conservatives have their own petition running. Reform have set one up too. Different parties, different politics, same conclusion: this scheme, as it stands, isn’t right.
Add up the engagement across all three and I’d put money on it outstripping whatever the council’s own official consultation manages to pull in.
And here’s the part that should make every resident furious: it won’t matter. The council will run its process, technically tick the consultation box, and push the scheme through regardless of how loudly residents across the political spectrum reject it.
That’s the real scam.
Not the speed limit itself, the pretence of listening.
Evidence from somewhere else entirely.
Dig into what the council is actually citing to justify this, and here’s the kicker: it isn’t even Birmingham evidence. It’s drawn from studies and data sets from other cities, other road networks, other traffic patterns entirely, dressed up and applied here as if Birmingham’s roads, Birmingham’s traffic, Birmingham’s specific accident data, don’t matter enough to justify the policy on their own terms.
If you’re going to reshape how an entire city drives, the evidence should come from that city. Anything less isn’t evidence-led policy. It’s policy looking for evidence to back it up after the decision’s already been made.
What the Highway Code actually says, from someone who lives by it.
I want to bring some professional experience into this, because I think it gets lost in the shouting on both sides.
The Highway Code sets out a hierarchy of road users. Think of it as a pyramid: those who can do the greatest harm, the biggest vehicles, carry the greatest responsibility to protect those most at risk, pedestrians, cyclists, children.
That’s not up for debate. It’s right, and every HGV driver worth their licence knows it and drives by it every single day.
But here’s the thing about that hierarchy: it already exists. It’s already the law. Every driver on this country’s roads is already bound by it, already held to it, and when something goes wrong, already investigated for it.
When there’s a serious collision, it gets properly investigated. Fault gets established. If a driver is found responsible and survives, they’re punished - licence, courts, the lot.
If a fatality occurs and the driver’s at fault, that detail is not usually published out of respect for the person who died, but make no mistake, it’s known, it’s on record, and consequences follow.
So my question is simple.
If Birmingham genuinely has a serious problem with dangerous driving on its roads, where’s the enforcement? Where are the police?
A blanket speed limit change doesn’t touch the driver doing 50 in a 20 zone, they’ll do 40 in a 20 zone just the same.
What actually stops dangerous driving is dangerous driving being caught, investigated and punished. That’s policing, not paint on a road sign.
Punishing the many for the few.
That’s the heart of why I call this a scam. It takes the failures of a tiny minority of dangerous drivers and uses them to justify restricting every single driver in this city, the overwhelming majority of whom drive carefully, responsibly, and already operate under a legal duty to protect the people around them.
That’s not road safety policy. That’s a blunt instrument being swung at everyone because it’s administratively easier than doing the harder, more targeted work: fixing the roads that are falling apart, funding proper enforcement, and holding the small number of genuinely dangerous drivers to account instead of restricting the many who already drive right.
Birmingham residents, whatever your politics, deserve better than that. This needs fighting, properly, and it needs fighting now, before the council gets to quietly point at a technically-completed consultation and say the decision’s already made.
