Fifty children have been seriously injured in road accidents in Brighton and Hove over the past five years, councillors were told in a debate about a proposed cut to road safety training.
A further 100 child pedestrians were slightly injured, according to Community Works representative Mark Strong, at a cost to society of about £16 million in total.
Mr Strong contrasted the cost of those children’s injuries with a proposed £165,000 cut to road safety training in Brighton and Hove City Council’s draft budget.
The training is available at 37 primary schools although the council said that 14 schools benefited from the “Safer Streets” programme, creating temporary pedestrian zones outside schools at drop-off and pick-up times.
A proposal in the council’s budget said that the child pedestrian training team should be refocused to prioritise the government’s Bikeability programme, which is supported with external grant funding, and school crossing patrols.
And an equality impact assessment said: “It’s important to note that the city’s slight and serious casualty figures per 100,000 population have always been higher than East or West Sussex.
“(This reflected) population density and traffic conditions and the number of children able to access their schools on foot.
“There have been no child pedestrian fatalities in the city either side of the pandemic years, though the serious casualty rate has increased.”
In the past three years, almost 4,500 year 3 children – aged seven and eight years old – have received the training.
The equality impact assessment added that road safety training “may be covered in PSHE (personal, social, health and economic) education at some schools either at a high level or in similar detail, without the practical element of the training.”
Mr Strong told the council’s Place Overview and Scrutiny Committee: “In the end, what you’re doing is outsourcing the costs of making the saving of £165,000.
“You’re outsourcing the cost to the NHS, to the families of those children who are injured and essentially taking that money out of your budgets and putting it on all other budgets.
“And that’s not even looking at the emotional costs to the people who are injured.”
Labour councillor Trevor Muten, the council’s cabinet member for transport and city infrastructure, said that it was a difficult decision – but the council was investing in the School Streets programme.
He said: “It has to be put into the context of the financial pressures we are under and not something we would do lightly. There are some other contexts to this. We are keeping Bikeability training.”
Conservative councillor Anne Meadows said: “I couldn’t understand why you’re prioritising cycling over young children learning and being given the tools they need to navigate our streets, particularly when walking to school.”
After the meeting, Councillor Meadows said: “Labour should be trying to protect children from cuts but this is a pattern.
“Schools are struggling with smaller budgets, teachers are losing their jobs and now the youngest are losing out on help with walking to school.
“It will only lead to more children being driven to school and more parents feeling this council doesn’t care about children.”
The Labour deputy leader of the council Jacob Taylor said that he and Councillor Muten would consider the comments made to see if there was another way to keep pedestrian training within schools.
The leader of the Conservative group, Councillor Alistair McNair, chairs the board of governors at Carden Primary School, in Hollingbury.
He shared a letter to governors which said that child pedestrian safety training started in 2006 because of increasing casualty levels and worked with about 1,600 year 3 children annually.