The London Borough of Croydon are pushing ahead with imposing wide-area 20 mph speed limits on the whole of the borough. There are two regions already committed to implementation after public consultations, with three more to go.

On the public consultation on the last region, the North-East, they only got a narrow margin of support in response to the question “Do you support the proposal to lower the speed limit to 20 mph for residential roads shown in the plan”. There were 50.5% responses which said “Yes” versus 47.1% who said “No”. Only responses from residents within the region were accepted though so all visitors and other road users from other parts of the borough or outside the borough were ignored.

We put some effort into raising awareness of the public consultation which at least meant they got over 3,100 responses.

But for the remaining three areas, the Council have decided to do away with a wide public consultation despite previously having agreed that would be the process and will only perform a “Statutory Consultation” as required by law. In other words, they will advertise the proposal and await responses. They will then consider them and like all such consultations, they can they ignore the result if they don’t like what is submitted.

Now everyone who knows Croydon will be aware that the three remaining parts of the borough are more rural in character than the first two. So it was very likely that they would have voted the other way and opposed a wide area 20 mph limit.

It would therefore appear that after only narrowly winning the votes of residents in previous consultations (and in fact rigging the results in the first area as we previously reported), they have given up on proper public consultations because they feared losing the vote.

That is what happens when dogmatic politicians take control of a Council and decide they know best, as is clearly the case in Croydon. Their idea of democracy is surely very different to most people’s. The Statutory Consultation will run from the 18 January 2017 till 15 February 2017. We will provide more information on it when known.

Roger Lawson