admin Bromley Council, Schools

School Streets Showdown in Bromley

A special meeting of Bromley Council’s Environment Committee will be held at 9am on Friday 15 July 2022. This meeting has one agenda item: the future of School Streets in London Borough of Bromley. If you’re a Bromley resident, do this now:

  1. Send an email to committee.services@bromley.gov.uk, including a 50 word question on School Streets (see below for more ideas about questions to ask), and explain your question is for the Environment Committee meeting on Friday 15 July. Questions must be received by 5pm on Monday 11 July.
  2. Write to your councillors (your elected representatives in local government) today to ask them why Bromley came 27th out of 33 London Boroughs in the 2022 Healthy Streets Scorecard (published on 5 July 2022), and what they intend to do about it. If one of your councillors is Cllr Thomas Turrell (councillor for Hayes and Coney Hall), you might want to ask him why he didn’t voice his support for Hayes Primary School Street at the Environment Committee meeting on 21 June, given that this School Street is in his ward, and he was present at the meeting.
  3. If you’re free 9am til 10am on Friday 15 July, fill out this form to register to attend the Environment Committee meeting on School Streets. We’ll see you there.

Why now?

At the Environment meeting on 21 June, a fractious debate took place over the council’s review of School Streets. On 24 June, Cllr Nicholas Bennett (Portfolio Holder for Transport) decided Bromley Council will not actively roll out School Streets in the borough. The following Friday (1 July), Bromley Labour and Bromley Liberal Democrats both independently “called in” this decision. This means the decision goes back to the Environment Committee to reconsider. This is happening on Friday 15 July, and that’s why we hope as many Bromley residents as possible will submit questions to this meeting or attend it in person.

What happens at a call in?

A “call in” meeting revisits a decision made by Bromley Council. Historically, call in meetings in Bromley provide a valuable opportunity to show the strength of feeling on an issue. For example, the call in meeting on the decision to relocate Beckenham Library took place during working hours on a weekday, but the public gallery was packed.

It is worth noting that it is not only opposition parties who call in decisions. For example, Bromley Conservative councillors previously called in a decision on the Crofton Road cycle way.

What is a School Street?

You can find out more by clicking one of these links:

Bromley Living Streets’ briefing on school streets

Mums for lungs

Living Streets

http://schoolstreets.org.uk/

Questions that can be submitted by residents to the call in meeting

  1. ANPR camera enforcement is used for all School Streets in Islington (where 49% of schools have School Streets), Hackney (45%), and Bromley’s neighbour Lewisham. Bromley hasn’t trialled ANPR for School Streets, on grounds of cost, but elsewhere ANPR cameras generate revenue. Will Bromley Council now trial ANPR for School Streets?
  2. Bromley has the highest % of trips made by car in the whole of London at 53%, and a target within the Mayor’s Transport Strategy to reduce this to 40%. Given the School Streets decision, can the Portfolio Holder now provide an indication of how this target will be reached?

admin Bromley Council

Now the elections are over, what next for safer walking and cycling in Bromley?

The local elections brought in a number of new councillors to represent wards across Bromley. As shown below, the main changes were Liberal Democrat councillors in Beckenham Town & Copers Cope and Bromley Town, Labour councillors in Plaistow and St Mary Cray, and the independent party Chislehurst Matters in Chislehurst. Bromley remains Conservative-controlled with a majority of 14 councillors. Many wards that remained Conservative also had new ward councillors selected. 

What does this mean for ongoing community-led efforts to improve the safety and liveability of our streets? The good news is that many new councillors take a supportive stance on safer streets, air pollution, encouraging walking and cycling, and climate change. Moreover, the range of councillors elected promises vibrant debate on many topics.

CLEAN AIR
Bromley Liberal Democrats supported Mums for Lungs election pledges, which included a call for a clean air cabinet member, a diesel-free borough by 2030, advocacy to phase out wood burning and the goal of delivering a School Street at every school by 2025 (with an alternative package of road safety measures where temporary road closures are not feasible).

SUPPORT FOR CYCLING
Bromley Liberal Democrats, Bromley Labour, Bromley Greens and Chislehurst Matters all supported Bromley Cyclists’ call for the development and implementation of an active travel strategy designed to increase the cycling trip share in Bromley from 1.8% to 5% by 2026/7. While the Conservatives did not provide a formal endorsement, Councillor Michael Tickner (Beckenham Town & Copers Cope ward) crucially acknowledged by email that: “safe cycle-friendly infrastructure has to be provided first in order for more people to take up cycling, not the other way round”. 

CLIMATE ACTION
Bromley Liberal Democrats, Bromley Labour and Bromley Green Party supported a coalition of community and faith-based groups calling for Bromley Council to declare a climate emergency and produce a plan to reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions for all activities across the borough. Climate action, active travel and road safety are tightly-linked issues as reaching net-zero will require a large shift towards walking, cycling and public transport use in Bromley.

In addition to this, all parties covered issues related to air quality, safer streets and more support for walking and cycling for all, such as the lack of a safe crossing at Chislehurst War Memorial, the lack of safe crossings on South Eden Park Road, and concerns over safety raised in the 2020 School Travel Survey conducted by Bromley Living Streets.

So what changes can we expect to see, and how can local communities support all ward councillors to give Bromley residents more sustainable travel choices and cleaner air? In this blog post we set out four priorities for change and four things that you can do to support councillors.

FOUR PRIORITIES FOR ACTION

1. Safe pedestrian crossings
Local centres across Bromley should have pedestrian crossings – either zebra or signalised crossings – to create safe walking routes to local parks, schools, high streets, and public facilities. These routes should be provided pro-actively, instead of waiting for a minimum number of casualties to justify a crossing at any given location.

2. A cycle network
Bromley lacks a joined-up network of separated cycle lanes across the borough, which is a major barrier to cycling for many residents. A network of protected cycle lanes connecting local centres across the borough will make it safer to switch to cycling as a low-cost travel option that reduces air pollution, congestion, and increases daily exercise.

3. Measures to reduce speeding
Until now Bromley Council has only taken limited action on speeding, often deferring responsibility to the Metropolitan Police and installing advisory warning signs that make only minimal difference to driver behaviour. Traffic calming measures should be introduced to reduce vehicle speeds and improve road safety.

4. School Streets
A School Street is a temporary restriction on motor vehicle traffic outside schools during drop-off and pick-up hours, to improve air quality and traffic safety at the school gate, and encourage parents to walk or cycle instead of driving. Over 500 School Streets have been introduced in London, mostly since the start of the pandemic. Bromley Council received funding from TfL for 11 School Streets but only six have been implemented so far.

FOUR WAYS TO ACTIVELY SUPPORT CHANGE

1. Make your voice heard
Your ward councillors are accountable to you, and you can write to them to ask for stronger action to make it safer to walk and cycle locally. Walking and cycling schemes can be sensitive when they impact things like on-street parking or right-of-way for drivers, so it’s important that councillors hear from those supporting change. You can copy your local residents’ association and Bromley Living Streets in on correspondence with councillors. Additionally, you can submit questions to Bromley Council to raise concerns at its Environment Committee public meeting. You can also subscribe to newsletters from Bromley Living Streets to stay up to date.

2. Start small
Alongside campaigns calling for safer streets, we can also push for change by working with the organisations and groups to which we are already connected. Reach out to your child’s school to ask about setting up a School Street, or work with your local church, faith group, community organisation or sports club to encourage and enable people to walk, cycle or take public transport to meetings or activities where possible.

3. Leadership from community and business organisations
Many organisations are reluctant to take openly political positions, however, this doesn’t mean you cannot give general support to measures that would improve road safety, air quality, and enable active travel. Moreover, as a key local stakeholder you could also contribute to shape how new schemes are designed and implemented to ensure that they meet local needs. For businesses this also makes good financial sense: more walkable streets are important to the local economy, pedestrians and cyclists spend 40% more in local shops than those travelling by car, and unsafe levels of air pollution are beginning to have a negative impact on property values.

4. Don’t give up!
Unfortunately, these changes won’t happen overnight. Continued support is needed from residents to encourage councillors to support safer streets, and hold them to account if they don’t deliver on their commitments.

admin Bromley Council

Last Environment Committee meeting before the local elections!

Photo taken on Farnaby Road, Shortlands

Can you spare 5 minutes today to send a question to Bromley Council Environment Committee? Questions need to be submitted by 5pm on 7 March to be accepted for the committee meeting on 21 March – full details of how to submit questions can be found here, and information about the meeting can be found here. 

We in Bromley Living Streets think that asking questions to the Environment Committee is a very valuable way to let the Council know what matters to local people – particularly important to do, given that local elections are taking place on 5 May 2022. Environment Committee meetings are the place where Bromley Council’s projects and policies are scrutinised, and members of the public raising issues in this forum is an important part of local democracy and a key way of encouraging local councillors to take action. There are reasons to think that this part of Bromley’s local democracy is looking increasingly healthy and vigorous: 100 written public questions were answered in the November 2021 Environment meeting, and 68 written public questions were answered in the January 2022 Environment meeting. (Important context here is that a large proportion of those submitted to the November 2021 were on a single issue.)

So what should you ask questions about? That’s up to you, but we think a particularly useful starting point for drafting a question is to look at the Council’s response to questions asked in recent Environment committee meetings, and think about what new questions are raised by the Council’s response. some ideas you might want to consider. For example, in the ‘Written Questions from the Public’ document for the Environment meeting on 19 January 2022, the Council’s response to the first question provides detailed figures on the School Travel Plan (STARS) scheme and Bikeability training, but does not provide figures for the increase in walking and cycling during the period between 2020 and 2021. A useful follow-up question would be to ask for these figures, particularly given that recent data indicates that 32% of the borough’s emissions come from transport, which is relatively high for a London borough. (Another useful follow-up question would be to ask for evidence to support the Council’s claim that the increase in walking and cycling between 2020 and 2021 “was influenced by LBB’s Road Safety Education programme, School Travel Planning Initiatives and Cycle training”.)

Feel free to Blind Carbon Copy (BCC) us into your email when you submit your questions, or forward your submitted questions to us after sending them to committee.services@bromley.gov.uk, so that we are aware of the issues that have been raised.