Croydon Council are pushing ahead with implementing wide-area, signed-only 20 MPH speed limits in the rest of the borough despite enormous numbers of objections.

The consultation process on Area 1 was clearly subject to fraud, and on Area 2 the vote in favour narrowed very substantially. So for areas 3, 4 and 5, which by their nature were more likely to oppose the proposal, they abandoned the previous consultation process and moved straight to a “statutory consultation”. That meant people had to take the trouble to write in with specific objections rather than simply respond to an on-line poll. The other advantage of that change is that objections to statutory consultations can be ignored so long as the council simply gives reasons to do so.

Was this process ethical? Absolutely not.

And what was the result of the formal statutory consultation on Areas 3, 4 and 5? They got 3,357 representations in total from 2,050 individuals, but only 103 of the representations were in support of the proposals. In detail there were a total of 18,862 objections of different kinds. These numbers are enormous for such a relatively small geographic area.

But are the Councillors and Council Officers going to reconsider? Absolutely not. A typical example of how dogma and policy decisions overrides the will of the people in some councils. The recommendation in a report to the Traffic Management Advisory Committee is to proceed regardless – see the report here which will be considered at a meeting on the 9th May – see Meeting-Agenda (Item 7 on the Agenda).

Residents of Croydon should go along to the meeting to show their concern about this anti-democratic approach, or make their feelings known to their local Councillors. And next time there is a vote for local Councillors, just bear in mind which Councillors and which political party (the Labour Party) have taken this stance in Croydon.

The last time I saw this ignoring of the electorate take place was in the London Borough of Richmond where the LibDems pushed through an emission based permit parking scheme against strong public opposition. They were subsequently removed from control of the Council by popular vote. And a very good thing that was too.

You can see more about the scheme in Croydon on our main web site. We did make written submissions on these schemes including on the latest 3 areas.

The report from Croydon Council does not adequately deal with all the objections, and in some regards is grossly misleading. For example, in Para 3.1.8 it says Manchester reported falls in cyclist and pedestrian casualties in 20 mph zones but due to the average speed reduction being only 0.7mph the further roll-out was being halted. In actual fact what Manchester City Council actually said (you can find their report on the web) was “Overall the results show that casualties in the phase 1 20mph area have not reduced as much as the casualty numbers citywide“. In other words, there was absolutely no benefit whatsoever in terms of casualties despite very high expenditure and if anything it made accident numbers worse.

Both ethics and democracy have clearly be thrown out of the window in Croydon.

Roger Lawson