Greenwich Council’s consultation on new controlled parking zones will be extended until the end of September, with its deputy leader insisting that the plans are “not a done deal”.
More public events will take place and will be moved to Woolwich Town Hall so more people can attend, while consultation materials will be revamped so more people can take part.
The extension – to Tuesday September 30 – comes after a torrid first 10 days for the council’s drive to extend parking permits to a swathe of the borough stretching from Lee Green in the west to Plumstead in the east, taking in Kidbrooke, Charlton, Woolwich, Shooters Hill and west Thamesmead.
Greenwich announced changes to the scheme about 90 minutes before the start of Wednesday night’s council meeting, as 100 demonstrators – mostly from Plumstead and Shooters Hill – gathered outside Woolwich Town Hall to protest against the changes. Residents there say there are few parking difficulties in what is a hilly area with poor public transport.
As well as permit parking, the Sustainable Streets plans include dockless cycle hire bays, new street trees, spaces for car clubs, cycle hangars and pay-by-phone parking.
Parking permits in most areas start from £20 for zero-emission vehicles and rise to £300 for the biggest polluters. Most residents pay at least £100, figures given to councillors tonight showed. Additional vehicles in a household carry a £100 surcharge.
The council’s transport policy calls for CPZs to be extended to the entire borough, while it wants car use to be cut as a response to climate change. An initial survey asking residents what changes they wanted to make in their streets was carried out in February.
The consultation has been criticised for its complexity and confusing layout, and for its timing over the summer school holidays. While adding “sustainable urban drainage” to streets – rain gardens to soak up flooding – is mentioned in the text, it does not feature on the maps as the council has not decided which streets should have it.
And most embarrassingly of all, the scores of maps were all dated June 2024 – giving the impression the council had ignored the survey in February. The council insisted that this was an error and the maps were signed off last month.
Residents need to find their street in one of 14 different areas, each of which has a set of maps detailing the changes the council hopes to make. At Wednesday night’s council meeting, Averil Lekau, the deputy leader and cabinet member for transport, said her team would work to make the consultation simpler.
“We’ve already had quite a large level of responses coming in, and some of the responses made us understand that there were certain challenges with the whole programme,” she said.
“So it was about understanding the maps, the timeframe, holidays and so on. Whether you are for it or against it, it’s an informal consultation and nothing here is a done deal. So I’d like to see as many people contribute to this consultation as possible.
“We will be doubling the number of engagement sessions. We’re also doing some work on improving access to the mapping so that people can use hyperlinks to get to the streets that they need to see. So we are trying to respond to the concerns that have been raised. This is by no way a way of saying we don’t want to hear [from people]. We really do want to hear what people have to say.”
Matt Hartley, the leader of the Conservative opposition, welcomed the extension but suggested that Lekau had work to do to “earn trust back” because of residents’ “scepticism and mistrust”.
He also accused Lekau of misleading residents by stating in a letter about the scheme that parking permits “currently start from £20 a year and depend on a vehicle’s emissions”.
While accepting the statement was “factually true”, he said it was also “fundamentally misleading” because most residents paid more than £100.
“I think it’s very clear,” Lekau said. “I said ‘start from’, and it is not to say that doesn’t change, but it starts from [£20]. Those are the fees and that’s what I set out.”
Hartley also criticised the recent scrapping of the highways committee, which had no decision-making power but used to hear petitions from residents about traffic schemes. Lekau said she would be happy to meet residents to discuss their petitions.
🗣️ The consultation is at sustainable-streets-rbg.commonplace.is
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