DJKillaQueen

Again that's not a balanced view. Thousands of cars use that road every day and the vast majority of them are responsible drivers. A car travelling at 30 mpr would look as though it is travelling faster to many pedestrians. Even experienced drivers often can not tell from eye what speed a passing car is going at. The crossing has pelican usage so how on earth is that not adaquate? You cross when the green man shows....how difficult is that? Edited to add that data does not show an abundance of accidents along that stretch of road. It does however show several incidents at the junction of EDR and PeckRye.

You acknowledge speed had nothing to do with the accident SP but where is the evidence of accidents caused by 'speeding' motorists elsewhere? The data just doesn't support that. It is a 30mpr B road and I rarely see any car exceeding that speed along that stretch of the road because it is so busy. Picking up speed doesn't mean that a driver is exceeeding the speed limit, and if the road is clear, a motorist is perfectly entitled to drive at 30mpr if the conditions allow. I can't remember the last time I managed 30mpr in my car along that stretch...and I've driven it at all times of day (and night). There is a perfectly safe place to cross at the lights not more than 20 metres away from the junction of Oakhurst at Crystal Palace Road. The most dangerous place along that stretch of road according to data by far is the junction with Peckham Rye where several vehicle and pedestrian accidents have occured including one fatality. And that is why improvements to that junction are part of the current two year programme for road improvements funding from TFL. Sense of persepective needed I think instead of knee jerk reaction.

It's impossible for any licenced premise to guarantee there will never be an incident of excessive noise....what matters is that it is a rare occureance as opposed to the rule.

I'm with BNG here. I sincerely hope the lad is ok but at the end of the day he made the mistake of crossing without looking. No amount of traffic calming or dedicated crossings will stop poor judgement.

Even with a minimum wage in place, a million plus people in full time employment need benefits to pay part of their rent. We can never compete with any ecomomy with a lower cost of living than ourselves. Low wages are already being subsidised by tax payers. Removing the minimum wage won't change or help any of that. We are locked into a vicious circle that will break at some point. Totally agree about germany though.

Good point.

As much fun as those of us computer savvy are to have with them, the sad reality is that many people are handing their details and money to them everyday (why else would the fraudsters do it?). Electronic fraud is so widespread now and often operated from abroad (where fraudsters are pretty safe from prosecution) that I can't see it diminishing anytime soon. Internet fraudsters stole my mother's I'd. She was 65 at the time and it destroyed her life for while. She died a year later. They are scum.

Good points motorbird. I do think we are hung up on a class system and all of the consequences of that. And I agree that education is a key in changing anything. Whilst I agree Nicholas that the labour market changes, we do also have to recognise that some people are never going to be any good at exams or formal methods of schooling. That doesn't matter in a society that has a range of service sector and manufacturing jobs for example. But in a society where the vast majority of jobs on offer rely on paper qualifications its a disaster. In the past, apprenticeships were crucial to addressing that. Now, apprentices are required to attend college and pass exams. That's of no help to the young person who is no good at formal education. It is a fundamental shift that has taken place in the UK over the last two decades. We need to go back to accepting that learning by doing is enough for some people to learn a trade without all the additional bureaucracy that the UK seems to love. It stifles employers and it stifles potential employees.

Any term is going to be relative but let's put it this way. There is a growing number of people in the UK whose income is unable to meet basic living costs. Some of them are in full time work and low paid. Some of them are elderly and rely on a state pension. Some of them are long term unemployed and I'd defy anyone to manage on ?67 per week (the rate of JSA) for any length of time. Obviously the measures for hardship today are very different to the measures we could use prior to the welfare state. But if the cost living is high enough, people become unable to pay for rent, pay for fuel and food in great enough numbers to talk of a 'poor' imo. This is happening in the UK. If a family have to live in less rooms than they need because it's all they can afford, there are consequences to that. Gaps in rich and poor are relative and the real issue is when people become disenfranchised from the society they live within. And unemployment and hardship are good indicators of when that might reach unnacceptable, levels along with low wages. Yes there is no doubt that some are spoilt by the welfare system (just as there are those who are spoilt by the bank of mum and dad) but those people aren't anywhere in the numbers the media would have us believe. Ask any of the exisitng charities. The demand for help with food (for both families and individuals) is rocketting. The numbers of those suffering from stress induced mental health problems is also increasing. At the end of the day we need jobs....and a better range of jobs at that.

I think the assumoption that all poor areas are full of the feckless, lazy and uneducated is also unfair. The term 'idle rich' comes to mind in reply to that. There used to a time when we had manual and unskilled jobs in abundance......provided for by industry with in house training and apprenticeships. Now we expect every person to have a fistfull of GSCE's just to work in McDonalds. A person even needs accreditation to be a labourer on a building site. This is disenfranchising exactly the kind of people who would have been served by un and semi-skilled industry previously. Those people are never going to find employment in creative industries run by middle class small business holders. The jobs market has changed, as we have lost industry to other parts of the world and filled our own labour markets with rules and regulations, but the needs of the labour market haven't, because people will always fall into different groups and there will always be a need for those kinds of jobs. And I think to criticise anyone for being uneducated is unfair too. We aren't all born with equal ability and we certainly don't have access to an equal standard of schooling either. Those living in poorer areas will be left with poorer schools, with bigger class sizes and they also possibly won't have the space and quiet at home for doing homework undisturbed. The issues are complex.

I can persuaded by the idea that the fa saw the opportunity to avoid compensation from a sacking SJ. I think that the fa though is too wrapped up in the 'business' of football tbh to make good decisions. As for Harry....I think he will encounter the same problems every england manager does.......lack of training time.......lack of world class players....etc etc. Being a successful club manager is a completely different thing to success at international level, which absolutely depends on having a pool of quality players to draw upon who can play together instinctively.

Irregardless of what anyone thinks of Terry (and my view of him is not something he could repeat to his mother) the FA left Capello with no choice. Either a manager is the manager or he isn't. The FA completely undermined Capello here. And let's not also forget that Capello is the highest paid international manager ever by far......which only leaves me with one word....'Chelsea' to illustrate where throwing money at the game gets you. Now we are less than 5 months away from an international tournament with no manager. If anyone was in doubt that the FA is run by f*ckwits before, they won't be now.

Katie?.........zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz ;D And edited to add (in an attempt to move on from the poor display of 'same old same old' the thread has descended into) that I think Fred has been treated more as a symbol of the recent crisis rather than scapegoat. Whatever the rights or wrongs of the removal of his knighthood on an individual and personal level, as a man 'at the top' in a public capacity he can't have been too suprised at the backlash. Banks have always accepted the role of engine of the economy. With power comes responsibility. I think they forgot that somewhere and someone was always going to have to personify that. Fred came to be that onev in the UK. I don't think he can complain about it tbh.

Let's remember that the application is for 2am closing on a THURSDAY evening! What person in their right mind thinks that is something residents should accept. I agree that this application has no consideration for residents. The compromise is late opening on a Friday and Saturday night which the bar has a licence for. The bar owners should be content with that imo.

Just want to take you up on a couple of points there fazer.... Property prices will continue to rise due to 1. Not enough homes because of land banking and a rotten (to is core) incompetent slow planning system. There are enough properties accross the country to house everyone. Many of them sit empty though for a variety of reasons. 2. Incompetent Council housing system which also restricts supply due to its poor expensive management and under development. That's not true either. If councils were allowed to keep 100% of the rents they collect then the day to day maintenance costs would be covered. The government creams off a % of all council rents and then gives some back as 'housing subsidy' which perpetuates the myth that council housing is subsidised, which it doesn't need to be. Capital building does requires loans though which have to be paid back with interest, and this gets some councils into trouble where they are still paying for loans taken to build homes they are now demolishing because of poor construction and design in the 60s. Add to that, that under Thatcher councils were not allowed to use the proceeds from 'right to buy' to build new homes. 'Right to buy' is the sole reason for a shortage of social hosuing. Labour tried to stem it by reducing the level of discount a tenant could receive from the market price. This is something Cameron intends to reverse....the result sadly will only be further depletion of social housing stock at well below market value. Immoral imo and completely stupid. Surely even Cameron can understand that poperty is outstripping salaries to a point that soon half the workforce will need HB top ups (it's currently a quarter of all those in work which is ludicrous). 6. Poor pension system, why would you put your money into a Pension where the chairman is driven around in a chauffer driven limo they have multi million pound offices and the returns to your pension is below the rate of inflation. The pensions fiasco is I think at the heart of government thinking on this as you know. Increasing numbers of private sectors workers have no pension. I am one of them (having worked out a long time ago that it would be a waste of money). Public sector workers enjoy special returns from their cheaper pension schemes that public sector workers (reliant on private pension schemes) don't. That causes a clash that is only going to get worse, as private sector tax payers refuse to fund public sector pension schemes. The government knows it is in for a rocky ride over it. A recipe for disaster at some time in the future. Couldn't agree more but whilst the country is run by people who are never touched by the consequences of the most detrimental decisions they make, I don't expect anything to change. Alex it has nothing to do with having a chip on any shoulder. It is about people not looking down on other areas (like Peckham) because those living in them are less fortunate. We are not born onto a level playing field. In London lots of people have benefitted from being born into a family that could afford to send them to public school, help buy them their first home etc. Equally plenty of people, who irregardless of how talented they are or how hard they work will never have any help in that respect because of the demographic they were born into. All the data backs up that argument regarding social mobility and background. It's just that some of us choose to see it and and others don't look beyond their own lives. I'm glad you are entertained Jessie....(something tells me you are not new to the area or the forum at all though).....just hope the housing market doesn't implode and you find yourself scrambling for some social housing in Peckham.......

OMG Ski Sunday! That takes me back :)

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I totally agree quids and that is something we are already seeing with the 50 plus age group, some of whom took early retirement funded by equity on their homes. It's not an easy thing to address either. I think were are so far gone down the road that the impact of doing anything is going to adversely affect too many people. I've always argued for measures that slow down growth and still think that would be the best way to go. It won't help solve the problems in the short term, but over time should address the gap between salaries and rent/house prices and without adversely affecting the value of homeowners.

No one says you shouldn't see an increse in equity....but an increase that outstrips every other business sector and is inpenetrable by recession? Can you not see where that is going to lead? Housing should never have been allowed to become the gravy train it did and the only real winners are those who bought in the 80's and before. They are also the ones who moan hardest when told they should use their equity to pay for their old age. You obviously bought something because you wanted a home first....but there a many people who work as hard as you have worked that will never get on any kind of property ladder. And in the future it will be impossible for increasing numbers of people while rents will continue to soar. And it will be your taxes that pay for the shortfall in affordable homes and rents. No government hall the balls to meddle with it of course because they know pensions are going to worthless in the future and are happy to let property become equity in place of pensions. Nice if you have it.... But a breaking point will come...ho many homeless it will take to see that breaking point is unknown but things can not continue as they are doing so.

Haussmann was the master of this and in Paris you?ll street after street of apartment buildings built around courtyards which are great for the occupants? quality of life. Here we?re obsessed with showing the world our open spaces which just makes them a no go area for us. I agree with this. But Paris has it's suburban 60's tower block estates too....and fell into the same pit as the rest of Europe. What was supposed to be cheap and easily built housing has proved to be anything but in the long run. In the UK, developers have the smallest minimum requirements regarding room size in Europe and all of them put profit ahead of quality. The flat I live in is 80 years old and as solid as the day it was built. Can't see anything built these days lasting even 50 years without need for major work.

I still think that regeneration is difficult without a change in the social fabric of an area. Most of the run-down parts of London that have regenerated have done so because the middle classes have moved in and displaced working class residents, social tenants, and so on. With unlimited public funds it's obviously possible to make an area like north Peckham much better for a while, but it won't keep improving unless its economy picks up on its own - which means rich people need to move in and make it trendy. Whilst I broadly agree with your point regarding regeneration and economy I don't agree that it requires the displacement of poor and working class people by wealthier and middle-class people to happen. What people need are jobs, and decently paid ones. London is a unique case because of it's diversity and being a capaital city. In other towns and cities around the country there is no monbile middle class in great enough numbers to gentrify areas that formerly were served for employment by the local factory or dock or mine. And displacement isn't actually adding anything to the economy at all....merely changing the economy on a local level. The poor and unemployed are just poor and unemployed somewhere else. And given that the main drive for the middle class moving into those areas is property prices it could be argued that there is no net gain to the local economy either as yet another area becomes unaffordable to most to live in, in time. So for me...that is not the answer to anything. Far more effort should be put into generating employment and helping those to get out of poverty, some of whom with the right help might want to set up small businesses and work for themselves as well. The setting up of a small business helps the local economy far more than filling the pockets of an individual who wants to make a fast profit on a property price I think. But at the same time, a small business needs customers to sell to, so the best and most self sufficient kind of local economy seems to me to be one where all kinds of people can afford to live.

I think it is also common sense to not grant a 2.30 am licence on a Thursday to a bar that sits next to residential dwellings. If we were to accept the premise that people should move when a bar opens or that people should never move next to a bar because it's licensing hours might change then we'd be left with islands of uninhabitable housing around shopping areas. So licensing is designed to keep the balance acceptable. I suspect the Adventure Bar will keep applying for this extension and it may well require repeated opposition each time it does to stop it from being granted.

But they will never appeal as much or have a community feel that Victorian terraced houses and flats have. What do you base this on? My estate very definitely has a community feel (it was built in 1930). There are no gangs, drug dealers or control by anti-social types because the residents (many of who are unemployed and/ or on low salaries) take an interest in building the community we want, fronted by a vibrant Tenants Association. It's a myth that a street is somehow more personable than a block of flats for example. What I find mostly decides if an area has a community or not, is the amount of time individuals have to be part of one. There's no doubt that the fragmentation of extended families over more recent decades, and changes in working hours and technology has had the most impact on this, rather than architecture.

East Dulwich has no estates? Are you sure? Are you sure crime is always related to poverty and unemployment? You might find greed is behind a lot of crime too....crime committed by people from all demographics it has to be said. The rich steal as much as the poor. Tax avoidance is akin to such as far as I'm concerned as well. I'm sorry Ben but imo you are using textbook stereotyping and simplistic social history to make an argument that just isn't relevant anymore. To compare today to the 1930's is nonsense. There was no welfare system in 1930 comparable to today and there really were slum dwellings then whereas you'd be hard pressed to find anything resembling a slum in those terms today. Renovation is an important part of quality of life just as overcrowding is detrimental to the quality of life. If anything....the biggest threat to housing quality is the rididulous protection of the over inflated housing market and those that seek to continue to profit from it at all costs to society. Fast forward five years and we will see increasing numbers of families housed in expensive one room bedsits because greedy landlords and those seeking to expand buy to let protfolios drove house prices and rents up even further and excluded increasing numbers of those on low salaries and benefits from being able to rent anything affordable. So frankly I couldn't give a toss about the gentrification of ED...... Where I do agree with you is in that regeneration needs to be about many things, including regeneration of industry and economy. But I would also add that a cohesive society depends on things outside of that.....outside of the growing gaps between wealthy and poor. Fact is we have a selfish 'all for me' society......and that can be found amongst all demographics. Everyone wants the best for themselves and their children but couldn't care less if the kids and parents next door have access to the same. For me this whole thread is a reflection of that. Who cares if Peckham being a demographically poorer area impacts on house prices in ED? How about caring if the kids in those areas are getting decent schooling instead?

but whether it stays nice now that the prop of public spending has been taken away is another matter. It's the kind of area that can be hit hard in a recession and start to deteriorate again. A lot depends on the local demographic. If the slums were cleared but the inhabitants all stayed, though in nicer buildings, then it may only be a matter of time before it feels like a slum again. But you are making a huge assupmtion there about the people who live in North Peckham (and if I were one of them might feel offended by that comment). Sure there will be some who take no pride in where they live. But the same can be said for ED. The local authoirity will continue with services such as bulk refuse collection even in times of recession, so there is no real evidence to think any area will degenerate into a slum. You might also perhaps like to take a look at Southwark Council's latest tenancy agreement too, where you'll see ample rules on what is expected from a tenant to ensure that where they live stays pleasant. The decent homes programme is still very much part of Southwark's agenda, so the programme of new windows and other essential mechanical engineering is set to continue. And the regeneration of the Aylesbury estate is also going ahead inspite of the recent economic crisis.