Partner Article

NE gets share of £2m road safety fund

Twenty-five local highway authorities and their partners across England will share the first award of a new £4 million road safety grant, Dr Stephen Ladyman, Road Safety Minister, announced yesterday. In the North East, four local authorities have obtained funding worth £796,500 to fund specific road safety initiatives.

The Road Safety Partnership Grant Scheme will provide funding to local highway authorities who are taking an innovative and collaborative approach to improving road safety. The four authorities and their areas of work are Durham’s Driver Outreach plan, Gateshead’s Child Pedestrian Training/Regional RS Monitoring Resource, community work in Hartlepool, and the South Tyneside engineering scheme.

Dr Ladyman said: “Road safety is an area where local projects can, and do, work extremely well and I am committed to encouraging communities to try and improve their road safety records. This new grant is designed to bring together a range of partners to develop innovative local schemes for that very reason. These schemes intend to tackle a range of issues – from seat belt use to improving the safety of child pedestrians; from tackling motorcycle safety to working with young drivers or those that drive for work. All of which are areas that we are concentrating on nationally, as laid out in our second Three Year Review of Road Safety.”

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Ruth Mitchell .