Environmental Scrutiny Commitee

[Rockets]

A number of people have mentioned, in various threads, some of the things brought up by the Scrutiny Committee on the environment and I just watched it and it was really interesting across a number of areas. Well worth a watch from about 1 hour 30 minutes in.

 

• Consultations
• CPZs
• E-scooters and e-bikes and the problems many have been having with them

Consultations

I do wonder if the council is  signalling a shift in the way Southwark consult and whether they are going to determine what happens at a local level based on research done at the borough level. We have seen this on the "mandate" for the CPZs where the council claimed that a research document (which had a large proportion of research done by engaging primary school children and students in the north of the borough) was what gave them the mandate for rolling out CPZs in the south of the borough.

Listen to what Cllr McAsh says (1 hour 34 minutes) when he says consultations (as they are run now) don't get a cross-section of the borough as those who respond tend to be, and I quote: "whiter, wealthier and more likely to be car owners" and then says they are going ward by ward knocking on doors of 1 in 10 houses on every street. All admirable stuff but I wonder how they record that input - a consultation online has definitive proof of how people responded and look at the lengths they went to try to determine where someone lived in many of the consultations (remember the ill-fated envelope code tied to each street). You can't hide that online response and if you do you could be subject to an FOI and there is a digital trail. It will be interesting to learn how they are selecting and recording the input of those they knock on the doors - remember the council extended the LTN consultation deadline by a couple of weeks and sent Labour activists out to door knock to encourage Labour voters to respond to the consultation. Have they learned lessons from that and now decided to lean-in more on verbal testimony from the people they select for door visits?

 

Interesting Dale Foden's comments of how difficult it is to get people in the south of the borough to give up their cars - there never seems to be any thoughts on why that might be the case and it seems ludicrous to me, if it is the case, that you apply feedback from someone living, working or being schooled, in the north of the borough near a tube station with those living in the south of the borough whose needs are completely different.

 

CPZs

Interesting to hear from Cllr McAsh that they have a moral and (perhaps more importantly - my words not his) legal obligation to listen to the views of their residents and I suspect they know the weight of public opinion is against them and I sense this is one of the reasons for the delay in the publishing of the results of the consultation and CPZ rollouts (and probably why they are suggesting the above).

 

 

 

 

 

[first mate]

Good you managed to see it. These sessions are quite illuminating.

[ianr]

>  (remember the ill-fated envelope code tied to each street).

I don't know what this was.

What was the date of the committee meeting?

 

[Rockets]

Ian, the council, during one of the LTN consultations, printed unique codes on the front of the envelopes dropped through people's door that needed to be entered when responding to the consultation so the council could identify that the person responding did actually live on that street - it was around the time of rumours of vested-interest groups like Southwark Cyclists and taxi drivers trying to influence the consultation even if they were from a completely different part of London. The council dropped the plan pretty quickly - I am not sure we ever heard why.