A PARISH councillor has made an impassioned plea for villagers to step up and make a difference after nearly two-thirds of volunteers backed out of a scheme to reduce speeding.

Janet Bond told residents at a recent Kingsclere Parish Council meeting: “Although Kingsclere worries about speeding traffic, it does not seem that people care enough to do anything about it.

“We started this exercise with 12 volunteers, but seven have resigned before we have even got started.”

Volunteers are desperately needed for SpeedWatch, a scheme in which volunteers from the community use hand-held equipment to record the speed of traffic. The results are passed to the police, who then contact drivers.

Hampshire Police have agreed to provide £1,000 in funding equipment and training for the scheme, but Cllr Bond said: “We have been waiting for four months, and we know we will have to wait longer.”

She claimed that the responsibility for the failure so far of the SpeedWatch scheme lay both with the police, who she said have taken “so long to do anything”, and with apathetic residents.

She said: “The whole of this village is worried about speeding traffic. It is an issue which comes up again and again and again, whatever the survey. But people do not want to do anything about it.”

She told the meeting that ideally the parish council would want 20 volunteers in total, but added: “Just a few more people coming forward would be better than nothing. It would mean that nobody would have to be sent out too often.”