Neil Garratt: Victory in Streatham! Labour suspends "Low Traffic Neighbourhood" which made congestion worse.

Neil Garratt is the Leader of the Conservative Group on the London Assembly and the London Assembly member for Croydon and Sutton.

Victory in Streatham! After months of denial and deflection, Lambeth Labour finally faced reality: the Streatham Wells Low Traffic Neighbourhood (LTN) was suspended on 7th March. And, in a shock to no one, the A23 Streatham High Road immediately flowed freely: the wall of buses gone, common sense ascendant. For now. Labour has retreated, but they will regroup and return. How do we prepare for that and how do we challenge LTNs elsewhere? I have some surprising evidence that rarely sees the light of day.

But first, let’s look at how we forced Labour into retreat in Lambeth. For months local people from all walks of life pressured Lambeth Council to see sense, including our excellent Streatham and Croydon North Parliamentary Candidate, Anthony Boutall. The LTN dominated local conversation, but Lambeth Labour rules with the iron fist of a one-party state. They planned to steamroller any opposition with the usual LTN platitudes, even as the Streatham High Road ground to a halt.

So I took the case to City Hall, putting Mayor Khan on the spot: was he aware of the problem, and as London Mayor what was he doing about it? Despite being familiar with the area, he chose to pretend everything was fine. That clip of him denying reality went viral, drawing derision and mockery across the board. And, with his re-election looming, came pressure on his Lambeth colleagues to make the problem disappear.

Here’s what I think will happen next. They will ask, “If you don’t want LTNs, what will you do instead to tackle the rampant rise in road traffic?” And the surprising answer is: there is no increase in road traffic in London. Why did you think there was? Who told you that? Perhaps an activist with an LTN to sell. It won’t have been Transport for London, whose latest official annual report states: “Despite rising population, road traffic volumes in London have been broadly stable over the last couple of decades.” Here’s the chart to go with that:

London’s population is up 22 per cent between 2001 and 2021 yet even before the pandemic traffic levels across Greater London (the purple line) were unchanged. In fact, TfL understates the case: there’s been no growth in outer London traffic, while inner and central London traffic has fallen. So what is the problem that LTNs are trying to solve?

Coming back to the traffic jam problem, there’s also something interesting about the TfL data on congestion, in their graph below. They measure congestion as the extra time it takes to travel a kilometre in the morning rush hour compared with the middle of the night. The green line is outer London, the area outside the north and south circulars where you find most of London’s traffic. That’s also where you’ll find Streatham. Morning peak congestion is the same now as 15 years ago. The Mayor claims that congestion is part of the “triple threat” facing London that requires London-wide ULEZ, LTNs, road pricing, and the widespread elimination of private cars. I suggest he reads his own reports.

Even more interesting are the red and blue lines showing congestion in inner London and central London. They DO show congestion getting worse pre-pandemic. But compare that to the first graph showing traffic volumes, in which central and inner London traffic is down. In those parts of London, we have less traffic but more congestion. Less traffic on the same roads cannot cause more traffic jams, so what is causing it? Could it be those political activists who’ve filled inner and central London with every anti-car device known to man? And who now use the very congestion they’ve engineered as an excuse for even more.

I think that’s a more plausible explanation that those people contorting themselves to believe that fewer cars on the same roads cause more traffic jams.

So when Labour relaunches their Streatham LTN; when your local council tells you that roadblocks are the best way to improve your local roads; when you tell them to shove it and they demand to know what you want instead; now you can tell them: you want them to look at the official data and explain, without waving their arms and shouting “CRISIS!”; what precisely is the problem they’re trying to solve.

And in the meantime, Londoners can mark their calendar for May 2nd to turn out in their droves to elect Susan Hall as Conservative Mayor of London. You see, despite LTNs in theory being a local council decision, in London you find City Hall’s sticky fingers all over them: paying councils to install them and threatening to claw back cash if they’re taken out. As part of Susan’s plan to get London moving, she will block City Hall funding for LTNs, while doing everything possible to help people remove them. Because unlike your local LTN fanatic, she’s looked at the data.