Quietway 7 traffic orders issued

“Quietway 7” – Proposed Traffic Orders, Road Humps and Pedestrian Crossings in the Turney Road, Rosendale Road to Gipsy Road, Gipsy Hill area.

Statutory consultation for the above Quietway 7 begins today. Lambeth Council have placed an advert in the South London Press and London Gazette, street notices have gone up on lampposts along the route and information will be placed on the Lambeth traffic orders web pages.

Information about the scheme and this stage of consultation can be found on the site: www.lambeth.gov.uk/quietway7

If you have any questions about the consultation please do contact us.

Consultation on Quietway 7 is LIVE and you can discuss with councillors at our public meeting

Quietway 7 is part of a network of proposed quieter, low-traffic routes across London designed to make cycling and walking safer and more pleasant. The proposed Quietway 7 runs from Elephant & Castle to Crystal Palace, with the Lambeth section running through Thurlow Park and Gipsy Hill wards.

We have consistently sought to ensure residents and local businesses have the opportunity to input into the design of the Quietway – pushing officers and TfL to withdraw plans for an experimental road closure and organising events, workshops and online questionnaires over the last two years. Recently, we were concerned that a decision had been made without some key changes residents asked for being implemented, and without any further opportunities for the local community to engage.

We therefore got this decision reversed, and over the summer we organised a number of meetings with groups such as the local businesses and the allotments with officers and designers, as well as a public meeting in each ward and meetings with individual residents who have requested them, and some changes have been made to accommodate concerns raised. Where changes we wanted to be made weren’t able to be accommodated by designers, we escalated to a meeting with the London Cycling and Walking Commissioner to make sure residents’ voices were heard at the highest possible level.

A consultation and detailed feedback from officers has been launched here – lambeth.gov.uk/quietway7 – where you can provide feedback until 5 November 2017.

We have also organised an event in the afternoon of Saturday 21 October at All Saints Church. This is to ensure residents have further opportunities to discuss the designs with councillors and look at hard copies of the plans.

We anticipate this being a busy event, so ask that you choose a timeslot to enable us to accommodate everyone who wishes to participate. Please stick to your chosen timeslot so that we can make sure we are able to hear everyone’s views. You can sign up here.

If you can’t make it, please do get in touch and we are happy to visit you at a later date to discuss individually.

Quietways – update from the drop-in surgery this week

Surgery this week for Rosendale and Turney Road residents

This week we organised a surgery for residents on Rosendale
and Turney Roads, who will be directly affected by the Quietway going past
their homes – it was an opportunity for those residents to have a one-to-one
discussion with the scheme designers to work through any potential issues with
access to their homes or driveways once junctions are redesigned or speed bumps
put in. Designers will use residents’ feedback and local knowledge to ensure
the scheme doesn’t inadvertently cause issues for individual residents. Anyone who couldn’t attend, we have offered to visit individually – do let us know if you would like us to come and meet with you.

This surgery follows a number of meetings that we convened over
the summer between designers and stakeholder groups like the Rosendale
Allotments and the businesses on Rosendale Road to revisit designs and make
sure their concerns are taken on board. We have also doorknocked residents and
had individual meetings with anyone who wanted to discuss the plans but has
been unable to attend meetings.

The feedback from these meetings is being used by the
designers to revisit plans and draw up suggested changes to the design which
take on board local residents’ and stakeholders’ input.

Full public consultation in September

These new designs will come to full public consultation –
which will be four weeks of on- and offline opportunities to see plans,
comment, and speak with officers and councillors throughout September. We will
organise public exhibitions in Thurlow Park ward and Gipsy Hill ward, and will
circulate plans by email and on the Lambeth website.

This work to involve the local community follows our “call-in”
to the designs which went to a decision in June – we didn’t feel these designs
accurately incorporated local feedback and asked the cabinet member to withdraw
the decision to enable us to get the designers and residents round the table to
revisit sections where the designs weren’t good enough. We were also concerned that cycling groups didn’t support the designs either.

We have consistently,
for the last two years, championed the importance of involving local residents –
from the start, we challenged a road closure that hadn’t been consulted on and
got it taken off the table. Over the last two years, we have organised many
public meetings, design workshops, stakeholder meetings with businesses and
other groups of residents, doorknocking, online surveys, public exhibitions and
walkabouts.

Changes we have secured to the design

So far, we have ensured that parking is retained by Turney School, and that the changes to the Turney Road/ Rosendale Road junction meet the
access needs of the allotments.

We continue to be unhappy about the proposal to
make Rosendale Road a through road at the junction with Parkhall, which would
involve removing the existing roundabout. We believe that this will encourage
traffic to speed up and will cause queues on Parkhall, without delivering the safety benefits that cyclists need – this is being
re-examined by designers who will come back to us with some new ideas.

The
designers are also looking at adjusting the location of the proposed zebra crossing
by Scotch Meats so that we retain shopping parking spaces, following our meeting with businesses.

Investment to tackle speeding we are pleased about

However, the scheme isn’t all bad. We have shifted the focus
of the officers from just a cycling route to a scheme which delivers wider improvements for
everyone, with a much greater focus on walking, reducing speeding and air
quality than was possible when Boris was Mayor.

The investment in Rosendale
Road is a unique opportunity to make sure we do get some changes made that
residents have asked us for – new zebra crossings, putting in a lot more cycling parking, getting rid of the useless “cushion”
speed humps we have now which encourage cars to swerve and speed and replacing
them with gentler humps which go across the full width of the road, more
planting and trees put in, and raised informal crossings on the side roads so
that cars must slow down instead of swerving round corners.

As cyclists and pedestrians ourselves, we think that reducing average speed and preventing excessive speeding will have the greatest positive impact on Rosendale Road in terms of it being and feeling safer to travel along. We’re pleased that we will be able to invest in cycle parking and greening, and to work with businesses to improve the area outside their shops further.

And while we’re happy to see these improvements on the table, we will continue to champion residents’ and businesses’ concerns about all the other
issues raised such as shopping parking and the Parkhall roundabout. We are also
keen to work with residents who live on the side roads, who experience high
levels of ratrunning traffic, to secure additional investment to help them to
reduce speeding on their roads too.

Quietways engagement – next steps

On 12 June, Lambeth Council’s website showed that a decision had been published regarding the design of Quietway 7 – the route along Rosendale Road and Turney Road.

This Quietway has been a fraught process since the outset, and we have worked closely with residents and community groups over the last two years to work towards a design that makes the road safer for residents, people shopping and working nearby, pedestrians, cyclists, pupils walking to school, and other road users.We organised a number of workshops and consultation events and have met with many residents on and near the route.

When the decision was published, we were concerned that the public feedback during the consultation and our contributions on residents’ behalf had not been taken into account. We therefore decided to call in the decision – this is a formal challenge to the decision and should only be used as a last resort, so we made sure to meet with the cabinet member and officers first.

Thanks to our willingness to engage with Lambeth stakeholders, and the ongoing work we have been doing with local residents on this, they have now agreed to withdraw the decision in order to take on board our points. They have committed to work with us to –

revisit the design, giving greater consideration to the responses to the last consultation
revise the project plan and timeline to include a 4-6 week public engagement period
put in place a process so that as your local councillors we have greater input into designs
review the engagement process for future transport projects so that this problem doesn’t arise again

We are pleased that this means, instead of time consuming and confrontational scrutiny meetings, we can get on with working with you to improve the scheme.

Next steps
Last week we met with the cabinet member and officers to discuss potential next steps. We shared these and listened to feedback at a public meeting we organised last Tuesday, which over 60 local residents attended.

Now to the end of July
Officers will revisit designs to look at where the most concerns and comments were raised during the consultation and from meetings with councillors, and will redesign sections to accommodate these.
We have requested that officers meet with important local stakeholder groups such as the Allotments and the Rosendale Road businesses, to ensure that new proposals are developed collaboratively and that their specific needs are met in the redrafted designs.

We, as your local councillors, will also meet with any residents or community groups wishing to discuss the designs. We will also keep our online survey open for residents to feed into and pass on any feedback received today. All contributions will be fed into the design process.

End of July/ early August
Officers will meet with councillors with completed new drafts so that councillors can ensure that feedback from residents and community groups has been fully incorporated, and request any further changes.

September
A public consultation will open, with a mixture of exhibitions, workshops and online feedback opportunities. We welcome any suggestions on how to make this as meaningful as possible. Officers and councillors will be on hand at all events to ensure any questions can be answered and that feedback is captured properly. This will also be an opportunity to contribute to the detailed design – this will include things like greening.

As a result of our public meeting, we have already started organising workshops between officers and the allotments and Rosendale Road businesses. We have also asked that the communication plan is shared so that residents can ensure it goes far enough to engage everybody.

Quietways design decision withdrawn to take on board our concerns and ensure public engagement

We are pleased to announce that thanks to our intervention the Quietways design decision has been withdrawn to allow for designs to be revisited and full consultation with residents.

We have been working hard for the last two years to ensure the designs meet the needs of residents and the local community, whether they live, walk, work and/ or cycle locally. Our approach has been consistent – to work with you and ensure there is opportunity for local residents to shape the design.

We have emphasised throughout to officers, colleagues and TfL that proper consultation is the only way to ensure a scheme which people want and will use, and which makes the roads safer and more pleasant. This is why over the last two years we organised public meetings, met with resident groups regularly, and pushed officers to take on board concerns. We have listened to your feedback and agreed that the designs weren’t good enough, which is why we submitted our call-in.

A call-in is a final resort, so we did not rush into that without meeting with officers and the cabinet member first, where we expressed our concerns and asked that we work together to resolve issues.

Thanks to our willingness to engage with the cabinet member and officers, they have therefore agreed to withdraw the decision in order to take on board our points. They have committed to work with us to –

– revisit it the responses to the last consultation
– revise the project plan and timeline to include a 4-6 week public engagement period
– put in place a process so that as your local councillors we have greater input into designs
– review the engagement process for future transport projects so that this problem doesn’t arise again

We are pleased that this means, instead of time consuming and confrontational scrutiny meetings, we can get on with working with you to improve the scheme.

We are meeting officers and the cabinet member tonight to discuss the next steps, so we will also be going ahead with our public meeting tomorrow, on Tuesday 27 June at Rosendale School from 6.30-8pm to hear your concerns and contributions and share the details of those next steps.

If you cannot attend, or would like us to come along to discuss this at your local resident or community group meetings, please reply to this email and we would be happy to meet with you separately.

Quietways call-in FAQ

We have been asked a number of questions regarding the
call-in and thought it would be useful to circulate answers. We will continue
to update these as more residents email with questions.

What does a call-in mean?

From time to time, the Cabinet may take a decision that
causes concern to some councillors to such an extent that they believe the
decision should be changed. The Local Government Act 2000 requires every
council to establish a mechanism which allows for executive decisions made but
not yet implemented to be ‘called in’ for consideration by scrutiny. This
includes decisions taken by Cabinet (collective or individual) or decisions
delegated to Chief Officers.

In Lambeth, a call-in can be made by councillors to ask
Overview and Scrutiny to send the decision back, or let the decision stand but
make recommendations, or approve the decision.

The call-in will be considered by members of the Overview
and Scrutiny Committee. If they deem it valid, a public meeting will be
organised to discuss the decision and the reasons given for calling it in.
Members of the public can also take part.

How can I take part?

Call-in meetings are public events and anyone can attend.
Members of the public can also request to ask questions or make short points at
this meeting.

Your local councillors will be representing you at the
meeting too, and would value your input. You can provide this input in a number
of ways –

Email your councillors on abirley@lambeth.gov.uk fcowell@lambeth.gov.uk and mdeckersdowber@lambeth.gov.uk
Attend our public meeting on 27 June at 6.30pm at
Rosendale Primary school
Invite us to join a meeting of your local
resident group or community organisation – for example we met with Turney Road
residents and the Rosendale Allotments this weekend
Complete our survey here

Who called in the decision?

Your local councillors, Anna, Max and Fred, called in the
decision.

Calling in a decision should be a last resort, so we waited
until we had held a meeting with the cabinet member and senior officers to see
if there was a quicker way to resolve the various issues and outstanding
questions without escalating the matter to Overview and Scrutiny Committee.

We found out after the call-in deadline had passed that the
councillor for Clapham Common, Cllr Briggs, also called in the decision,
although we are unclear why a representative from a different part of Lambeth would
take a new interest in West Dulwich and West Norwood without the courtesy of
discussing with the cabinet member or local councillors, given a lack of previous
interest shown to any local or cycling matters.

Why are local councillors calling in the decision?

We want Rosendale Road, Turney Road, and the surrounding streets to be safe for pedestrians, cyclists, and children walking to school or crossing the road. It should be a pleasant environment to live and work in, and the local community should have some say on, and ownership over, how this is developed.

We think the plans fail to take into account the feedback that residents gave in the consultation last year – and as a result do not achieve the safety and environmental improvements the community need. We do not want to cancel Quietways but we do want to make sure that local changes are as good as possible. We have asked for the proposals to be improved and for a full final consultation before the plans are signed off.

In particular, we want a much safer proposals for the junction at Parkhall,

to ensure good access to the Rosendale Allotments,

better safety at the junction of Turney and Rosendale for children travelling to school, and sufficient greening the length of the route.

Why does the call-in focus on the design rather than the
overall route chosen?

The route was decided in 2013 by Andrew Gilligan, the then
Cycling Commissioner. A call-in must be specific to a particular decision, and
taken within a very limited time period after that decision is made (5 working
days). At a local level, councillors at the time report that they were not
included in this decision, although Cllr John Whelan was the leader of
Lambeth’s Conservative Group at the time and will have had the ability to have
questioned the choice of route had he chosen to.

This call-in is to challenge the decision made on 12 June
which is about the design. We think that the route along Rosendale Road means
there will be a unique investment in our local neighbourhood – which we would
welcome should the proposals deliver genuine improvements in safety for
residents, cyclists and pedestrians, and should the community have genuine
input into the design.

Therefore, the scope of the review by Overview and Scrutiny
will focus on the design as detailed in the decision published here.

Does this delay improvements to Rosendale Road?

Yes, inevitably it takes time to review a decision and make
recommendations. However, we hope that any delay to works starting will be
mitigated by a much improved design which will deliver greater local benefits.
We will be working closely with the cabinet member and officers to ensure
delays are minimised.

Our Quietways call-in

On 12 June, Lambeth Council’s website showed that a decision had been published regarding the design of Quietway 7 – the route along Rosendale Road and Turney Road.

This Quietway has been a fraught process since the outset, and we have worked closely with residents and community groups to ensure that we achieve a design that makes the road safer for cyclists and pedestrians, but that is acceptable to people living, shopping and working nearby too.

We ensured the original proposal to close Rosendale Road to through traffic was taken off the table and organised a full consultation in 2015, with public meetings, co-design workshops and exhibitions of proposals. There was an online consultation on plans in March 2016 and we have continued to push for changes since – in particularly to retain parking near to Turney School, to ensure continued access to the Rosendale Allotments and to ensure the Parkhall/ Rosendale junction does not change in a way which speeds up cars or causes additional traffic queues.

When the decision was published, we were concerned that the public feedback during the consultation and our contributions on residents’ behalf had not been taken into account as plans appeared unchanged except for the reinstatement of parking on Turney Road. And as cyclists, we don’t believe the scheme delivers the safety improvements that cyclists and pedestrians need either.

We met with the cabinet member and lead officers to express our concerns and discuss how we can address those, and will continue to meet regularly. We are meeting with TfL officers regarding the route and the junction on the South Circular too.

We have also decided to request a “call in” on the decision – this is a formal challenge to the decision and could result in the decision being sent back to rethink, or modified before it can be implemented.

Our “call in” asks for plans to be changed so that they reflect our concerns and community feedback, and for a full consultation on new plans – both online and in public workshops. Scrutiny committee are meeting in a few days to consider our request, and if it is accepted there will be a public meeting to discuss the decision and make recommendations.

Knife incident on Rosendale Road yesterday

We are aware that there was a fight on Rosendale Road yesterday involving knives. The incident is being investigated and we are in regular communication with our Safer Neighbourhood Police Officers who will be looking to increase patrols in this area.

If you have any information or concerns, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with us or with our local police using these contact details. If you witness a crime please always call 999.

The Rosendale Road Christmas Market will return on Saturday 26 November, as part of the Love West Dulwich Christmas Fair. 10am – 4pm.

Supporting local artists and residents, stalls at the market include, Christmas cards & crafts, art & prints, handmade jewelry, cakes, handmade baby & children’s clothes, textiles and much more. There will also be stalls supporting local charities, including L’Arche, Norwood Foodbank, All Saints and West Dulwich Girl Guides.

As well as the market, lots of the local shops and businesses will be joining in with special in-store activities for all the family to enjoy. Across West Dulwich there will be:
– Santa’s Grotto and face painting at Wigwam Toy Shop;
– Pulled pork and homemade sausages from Scotch Meats;
– A visit from Miss Christmas;
– Christmas decoration workshop at the dulwich trader;
– Mulled wine and craft beer hut at The Rosendale Pub;
– Live entertainment on Croxted and Rosendale Roads from local choirs and GDND Street Dancers.

Norwood Road closed to traffic as police recover machine gun from car

Norwood Road was closed to traffic in both directions on Tuesday evening as police pulled over a car suspected to be carrying firearms. A 23 year old man and a 30 year old woman were arrested on suspicion of possession of firearms. The man was tasered when he reportedly refused to comply with officers, and was taken to hospital as a precaution before being taken into custody.

A search of the car revealed what police believe to be a Mac10 machine pistol and ammunition. These have been sent for forensic testing.

Detective Superintendent Mark Maberly of the Trident and Area Crime Command said: “Trident is committed in its efforts to proactively target those supplying and possessing firearms. We continue to work with the local community to tackle gun enabled crime and the associated criminality that comes with it. These types of operations can be challenging but are conducted by highly trained officers to bring about a safe resolution and ultimately make London streets safer.”

If you have any information about gun or gang crime you can contact Trident via 101. To give information anonymously please contact Crimestoppers on 0800 555 111.