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.
Conservative Councillor Anne Meadows seems to have a pattern of not understanding things explained directly to her, often, I find. It’s not prioritising cycling over young children learning; it has been clearly identified that the cycling element has external funding.
Anyway, my thoughts are how has £165,000 been spent previously on what appears to be a very straightforward educational element of teaching young people about being safe on roads? I’d imagine an upfront cost for creating the material, and then delivery of that content should be next to nothing. There’s a question, I feel, about whether that element was cost-effective in the first place.
What ages are the children who suffered an accident ? Anecdotally the only children I see taking risks are the older ones looking on their smartphone.
The published cost is incorrect. It is way less than that. 1500-2000 children are trained each year with practical classes about being a safe pedestrian and different ways to cross the road in lots of eventualities they may come across as an independent teenager. Unfortunately not all parent/carers are able or willing to teach their children the basic rules. If only it were as simple as them just being on their phone…..
The published cost in the story is the amount for this activity in the Council’s 2026-27 draft budget, which is what is being cut.
The meeting last Thursday was told how many children were trained in each of the preceding three years, a total of just under 4,500.
I haven’t seen the letter to governors, but the 1,600 a year figure, cited above, is credible.
Benjamin, I think you’re oversimplifying both the funding point and the nature of the programme.
Yes, Bikeability has external grant funding — but that doesn’t automatically mean it should be protected while pedestrian training is cut. External funding should complement local priorities, not dictate them. If child pedestrian casualties are demonstrably high, the council still has discretion over how it allocates its own core budget. Choosing to protect one area while cutting another is still a prioritisation decision, even if one pot is partly ringfenced.
More importantly, the suggestion that pedestrian training is just a “straightforward educational element” with minimal ongoing cost misunderstands what the programme actually involves. This isn’t a leaflet or a one-off classroom talk. It’s practical, supervised, on-street training with qualified staff working directly with seven- and eight-year-olds in live traffic environments. That requires:
Trained instructors
DBS checks and safeguarding compliance
Risk assessments and insurance
Coordination with schools
Staff time for delivery and travel
Those are recurring operational costs, not just an upfront materials expense.
You also have to weigh cost-effectiveness properly. £165,000 across the city is modest in the context of a transport budget. When 50 children have been seriously injured over five years — with an estimated £16 million cost to society — preventing even a handful of serious injuries would likely offset the entire saving. Road safety interventions are typically judged not just on immediate cost per pupil, but on avoided long-term health, social, and economic costs.
If anything, the stronger financial question isn’t “why does it cost £165k?” but “what would the injury rate look like without it?” Cutting prevention because it’s hard to see the counterfactual is a risky approach.
Finally, there’s a broader policy signal here. If we want more children walking to school — which aligns with congestion, air quality, and public health goals — then equipping them with practical road skills is foundational. Otherwise, as Councillor Meadows suggested, parents will default to driving, undermining wider transport objectives.
So this isn’t about misunderstanding. It’s about whether prevention, particularly for young children navigating busy urban streets, is considered a core responsibility worth protecting — even in tight financial times.