THE county council has been accused of stalling work on £40,000 of road safety improvements in a rural village.

Stephen Burt is calling for Gloucestershire County Council to start the work in Stone before a child is killed.

Proposed plans include dropping the speed limit from 50mph to 40mph.

"The plans and money has been approved for at least two years so why is it not going ahead? What is the blocker?," he said.

"It is not cars that are the problem it is lorries. They are 40 tonne vehicles and they are travelling at 50mph. It would take them 200 yards to stop if a child ran out in front of them and the child would be killed.

"We drive our children to school, which environmentally goes against what the government tell you. We would gladly walk our children to school but it is so dangerous we don't do it.

"If they want to get people out of the car and walking to school they have to put their money where their mouth is and do something about it."

Mr Burt, who is chairman of Stone with Woodford Primary School PTA, has been campaigning for improvements since he moved to the village.

He said: "Four years ago I got in touch with the county council to see when they were going to do the improvements.

"The biggest problem is that they don't reply and you don't know where you stand. In three and a half years I have had two replies to my letters and emails.

"Everybody passes the buck and divorces themselves of doing something and I get fed up with it.

"It annoys me that we have to batter them with letters in order to get anything done when it should be done as part of their responsibility in the first place.

"The next thing to do is to start a pressure group if nothing is done. If everybody got their heads together they could sort this out."

He also blames the refusal of planning permission for a 20-home development and new access road on the school site on the lack of action saying: "If that had gone ahead everything would have been resolved," he said.

"We need road improvements, a path to school, and planning permission to go ahead."

Despite several attempts, the Gazette was unable to get a comment from Gloucestershire County Council.