The march of progress?
...and the political hokey cokey around cars
This week’s Court of Appeal ruling that Tower Hamlets’ decision to remove ‘liveable streets’ measures in Bethnal Green was unlawful, is a historic one for London.
Save Our Safer Streets (SoSS) is a grassroots campaign battling mayor Lutfur Rahman’s attempts to remove Low Traffic Neighbourhoods that were installed in 2020.
Their solicitor, Ricardo Gama, at Leigh Day, said: “In a context where the Mayor of London’s transport strategy promotes low traffic infrastructure, and Tower Hamlets had agreed a plan to implement the Bethnal Green low traffic schemes, this judgment confirms that the Tower Hamlets’ Mayor cannot unilaterally go against that strategy.”
It also means that schemes delivered elsewhere in London in the last nine years can’t simply be removed by political leaders who happen to come in, say, in May, and don’t like LTNs, bike lanes or pedestrianisation schemes. Unless there’s mutual agreement between the borough and Transport for London to do otherwise, the hard-won reclamation of street space in the capital for people will remain.
SoSS said, pointedly, that a 2023 survey showed more than half of residents wanted to walk or wheel more, and almost as many wanted to cycle more, adding: “We would like to see the council listen to the views of residents, schools, GPs, the Met Police and TfL and work with them to make transport policy decisions that people actually want.”
Meanwhile, in neighbouring Newham, efforts to perform a handbrake on the previous administration’s direction of travel are looking increasingly out of kilter with the current mood, and the needs of local people.
A giveaway for drivers
Election pledges by Labour’s mayoral candidate for Newham, Forhad Hussain, include a £20m giveaway for drivers, despite half of the borough’s households having no access to a car.
In an apparent bid to prevent Labour voters fleeing to a pro-car Independent candidate, among others, over Labour’s stance on Gaza, Hussain has in recent weeks shared election pledges which local Labour colleagues feel uncomfortable about. These include reversing the borough’s hard-won emissions-based parking permit system to give households’ first car parking permit away for free - along with free parking anywhere in the borough for the first hour. The estimated cost of this over four years has been put at £20m.
Meanwhile, the Independent candidate Hussain has his eyes on, Mehmood Mirza, has gone one better, offering the first permit free and not one but two hours’ free parking. He’s also offering to cancel all proposed Low Traffic Neighbourhoods (LTNs) and to ‘properly consult on the existing ones’. He’s proposing a new multi-storey car park on one of the most stressful and dangerous shopping streets in the borough in my opinion, Green Street. It’s safe to say generating even more car trips with a multi-storey car park - a solution straight out of the 1960s - is probably not the answer.
This loss of parking funding could be devastating for the council’s purse, but specifically for Hussain’s pledge to spend an extra £12m over four years on street cleaning, repairing pavements, fixing potholes and dealing with fly tipping - which are funded by those parking fees.
I give you… a £32m financial hole to plug
How Hussain will fix this £32m-plus financial hole to meet his various pledges is unclear, but what is also unclear is the rationale for the proposals. While Labour is expected to receive a thrashing in the upcoming election, losing a dozen seats in Newham, according to Politics Home - potentially more according to local Labour members - some of that threat comes from the Greens, who are broadly supportive of traffic reduction, walking, cycling and public transport, and clean air. As are many residents.
Meanwhile, little more than half of Newham households (52%) have access to a car, and just 7% have more than one vehicle. Car ownership is not equally spread: London-wide, 78% of households earning less than £10,000, and 64% of those earning between 10,000 and £19,999 do not have access to a car.
Someone involved in local politics told me: “the idea you’d give money to the richest half of the population strikes me as idiotic politics. One free hour of parking in the borough is inducing car journeys for short trips.”
If the LTNs and Healthy School Streets - which have proven effective in the borough at reducing air pollution and car trips, and boosting cycling - do prove popular in the community ballots Hussain or Mirza want to see for each proposed scheme - they will have to find the money from their drastically reduced parking budget to deliver. If not, they risk further tipping the balance of spending towards one half of the population and, in the case of Hussain, angering Labour colleagues.
As an aside, how Newham’s already stretched parking services would manage a situation where they could only ticket a vehicle once it had been parked in the wrong zone for at least an hour, one can only imagine.
Out of kilter with London Labour?
These stated aims are out of kilter with the direction of travel around transport, under the current Labour mayor of Newham, and under London’s Labour mayor Sir Sadiq Khan’s wider policies. Newham’s annual parking report underscores how the two are interlinked:
“Our primary aim as a service continues to be the on-going implementation of the Mayor’s Air Quality Action Plan the overriding aim of which is to provide the residents, visitors and those who work within this borough, with a healthier and safer environment within which to live, work and travel.”
“...to this end, the Mayor’s action plan underpins almost every initiative implemented by the Parking Enforcement service. Newham’s continuing policy of implementing measures to improve air quality for its residents, visitors and those who work within our boundaries is delivering improvements in air quality, especially around locations where Healthy School Streets have been introduced.”
Newham’s parking policy document states a core purpose of home parking zones is to address car ownership, including the type of vehicle people own, with a recently-introduced emissions-based fees structure. The impact of the status quo is serious: one in seven Newham residents is exposed to illegally high levels of NO2, harming their health and limiting life chances, with 7.5% of deaths in Newham attributable to particulate air pollution.
Newham also has among the highest levels of physical inactivity, and the highest obesity/overweight rates in the country. Just 59.5% of residents achieve the recommended 150 minutes of exercise per week - and those from ethnically minoritised groups are disproportionately harmed by this. Safer streets, with lower levels of motor traffic and better walking and cycling facilities, enable more people to build physical activity into their daily lives - more than a third of Londoners would cycle more if motorists drove more safely.
London-wide, per capita car driver trips are trending downwards, hitting a record low in 2024/25 of two trips per person per day. Meanwhile, active and sustainable trip share rose by 1.2% to 68.4% among residents, (which is not the same as the mayor’s 80% target, which includes visitors).
And LTN fears never materialised
Why go against this trend? If it’s not for health, nor to improve transport options for residents, and it won’t benefit half of Newham residents financially, what could the rationale be? Surely not for blokes who film themselves sitting around whingeing that while they want cleaner air they aren’t willing to accept inconvenience to their car journeys for it? Claims that pharmacies can no longer deliver to residents in one Low Traffic Neighbourhood seem highly disingenuous given the below. The LTN surrounding this park is bordered by pharmacies.
It’s also no surprise to anyone that the feared increase in boundary road traffic never came to pass.
Coincidentally, the West Ham LTN was ‘called in’ this week within Newham council, which means there was a meeting about the decision making process. It was referred back to the Head of Highways, the decisionmaker, but even ahead of today’s Tower Hamlets ruling it was unlikely to be rescinded.
One complaint by opponents was a lack of consultation. As one local councillor points out there was, in fact, a lot of engagement for the West Ham LTN.
Back from the wilderness?
For Forhad Hussain, he seems to have come back from some years in the wilderness. After standing for Respect in 2006, he moved back to Labour in 2010, before leaving his post in the council in 2018. As one local Labour member told me “Now he’s come back pretty much from nowhere… I don’t recall seeing him at any meeting in the last eight years… I don’t remember seeing [Hussain] out and about anywhere.”
Although the local party has been suspended for five of those eight years, and candidate selections were made from central Labour, could these strange policies be indicative of a politician who hasn’t quite taken the temperature of local people?
What is clear is Labour are in trouble, even in a historically safe seat like Newham. Throwing residents under the parked car seems to be the current solution. Setting aside residents’ needs, politically-speaking it’s looking an increasingly questionable stance.
Forhad Hussain was approached for comment.
Nice one Laura.
Given this ruling goes back over 9 years, does it also cover the cycle lanes in Kensington which lasted only 6 weeks?