Road Safety and Active Travel to School

Brian Mathew Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd April 2025 Westminster Hall

[Brian Mathew (Melksham and Devizes) (LD)]

It is an honour to speak under your chairship, Mrs Hobhouse. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Didcot and Wantage (Olly Glover) for securing the debate.

Giving children the opportunity to safely walk or cycle to school is vital. It not only ingrains healthy habits in children from a young age, bringing them closer to the nature and scenery that can be found in areas such as my constituency of Melksham and Devizes, but it teaches them road safety lessons, fosters independence and helps prevent climate change. Active travel practices in schools can also reduce traffic volume in our towns and villages as the number of cars around schools are reduced, thus minimising both pollution and the risk of road accidents.

I commend Holt VC primary school in my constituency for its Big Walk and Wheel programme earlier this year, which saw many children in the village walk and cycle to school and take part in a walking bus. We need to encourage more of this. In Bradford-on-Avon, a town in my constituency that suffers greatly from traffic congestion, traffic is even worse during term time. This has meant more dangers for those on the road, especially children.

During my time as a Wiltshire councillor, I worked with the Wiltshire Climate Alliance, as well as a number of other active travel-and-road-safety groups, to improve safety for those who use our roads—from cyclists to pedestrians, horses and horse riders. Unfortunately, that failed, but I hope the upcoming road safety strategy can be effective. Let us make travel to school not just pleasurable, but safe.

Passenger Railway Services (Public Ownership) Bill

Brian Mathew Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 29th July 2024 Commons Chamber

[Brian Mathew (Melksham and Devizes) (LD)]

Thank you very much, Madam Deputy Speaker, and congratulations on your new role. I also congratulate the new Secretary of State.

I thank all those who have made maiden speeches, including—I have a list, too—the hon. Members for Hertford and Stortford (Josh Dean), for South Ribble (Mr Foster), for Stevenage (Kevin Bonavia), for High Peak (Jon Pearce), for Smethwick (Gurinder Josan) and for Birmingham Northfield (Laurence Turner), and my hon. Friends the Members for Taunton and Wellington (Mr Amos) and for Thornbury and Yate (Claire Young).

I welcome this debate on passenger railway services, as one of many railway users who all too often finds himself standing up on the Great Western Railway service to London from the west country. We need a better service and whatever makes that happen is, to my mind, welcome. Also welcome would be the opening of a new Devizes Parkway railway station.

I welcome the Chancellor’s statement earlier today concerning the review of the Stonehenge tunnel. As a Wiltshire councillor, I have long opposed this abomination of a scheme, given that alternatives exist to solve the problem on the A303—because of its denial of the birthright of everyone, since time immemorial, to see the stones as they travel the ancient way across Salisbury plain by car, by HGV, by charabanc, on horseback, in a cart or on foot, because of the damage that it presents to the environment and, indeed, because of the loss of world heritage status.

Over the last year I have taken part in a number of water blessings with druids, shamans and interfaith practitioners—including Andrew Rumsey, the Bishop of Ramsbury—partly to celebrate our sacred rivers and streams, but also to highlight the pollution threat to our waterways. One of the springs, the Blickmead, is directly threatened by the building of the Stonehenge tunnel. I can testify to the presence of the two huge pike that we witnessed circling the pool below the spring like nature’s guardians. I hope that their future can be assured, and a new way found both to protect and to celebrate our beautiful planet and all the life that lives on it.

In a maiden speech, it is traditional that we mention the good work of past MPs. In my case, the wonderful new seat of Melksham and Devizes is made up of three former constituencies. I should mention James Gray, once of North Wiltshire and known by some as the Minister for Vellum because of his valiant efforts to maintain the use of that material in manuscripts, and the right honourable Michelle Donelan, the former Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology as well as the former MP for the old Chippenham constituency. I first met Michelle in the street in Chippenham some years ago, shortly after she had been first elected. Thanks to a Lyme disease campaigner who had visited her surgery, she had realised that she was suffering from the disease herself. Her openness about that fact has helped to raise the issue of Lyme disease and the importance of early diagnosis, as well as the need for more research on the long-term treatment for victims of the disease, and I commend her for this. The third former constituency to make up Melksham and Devizes was, of course, Devizes itself, and I look forward to meeting its former MP, who is, of course, still in the House as the hon. Member for East Wiltshire (Danny Kruger), to discuss issues of casework.

The Melksham and Devizes constituency stretches from my own Wiltshire council ward of Box and Colerne across the beautiful Bybrook valley and Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s iconic Box tunnel all the way to Devizes, via Bradford-on-Avon, Melksham itself and some of the prettiest villages in England, including Steeple Ashton, Urchfont, the Lavingtons, Seend and Bishops Cannings, to name but a few. Despite the beauty of the place, these communities face the same problems as much of the rest of the country. I have already reached out to the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care to ensure that NHS issues across my constituency are dealt with, including the plight of the GPs of the Three Shires Group of rural surgeries, who have had to take a two-month salary break to keep their surgeries solvent. In Melksham there are calls for the return of basic services at the local hospital, and across the constituency NHS dental services are in freefall, with people wondering how they will be able to afford the cost of basic treatment.

I want to end by reflecting on the words of the late Jo Cox, who famously said that there is more that unites us than divides us. There is also more that we can achieve across parties by working together on issues such as health and social care and, indeed, social housing provision. I look forward in this Parliament to doing just that, not only with members of all parties in this place but with councillors of all parties, across my constituency.