Do not rely on your councillors to support you

I previously lived in Wyneham Road and remember the 2005 consultation. Subsequently I moved to the other side of the hill where a CPZ has recently been introduced in the Herne Hill Road, Ferndene Road area. Based off these experiences I have the following observations and recommendations to make.

1) Mobilise! The council rely on residents inertia, weariness and fatalism to push these things through. Lobby loud and hard. In a large section of our roads - about a third of the now CPZ - a petition against the CPZ proposal attracted over 250 signatures as compared to the 73 people who subsequently voted in favour through the official consultation questionnaire. The Council dismissed the petition on the grounds it was not 'statistically comparable' to the official consultation. Setting aside the serious questions this raises about the demcratic process the important lesson to learn is this: of the 250 people who signed the petition only 72 made the effort to complete the official questionnaire. Inertia, of which I was guilty too, cost this area dearly.

2)Do not rely on your councillors to support you. Central government has a massive budget shortfall and consequently local governmenmt is and will feel the squeeze. You live in nice big expensive houses: no self respecting ambitious councillor will help you avoid the implementation of a lucrative annuity revenue stream. In our instance residents failed to observe that the ward councillor was also head of finance for Lambeth Council.

3) Think about who will get parking fines or have their cars towed away. It will not be the regular drive-train commuters - they will observe the change and simply park their cars elsewhere. Assuming the CPZ will operate between 12 and 2pm, those impacted by penalties will be YOU, directly or indirectly. They will catch i) visiting friends, family or workmen who either don't notice the signs, misunderstand the signs, or who simply loose track of time and overrun the meter or 12pm watershed; ii)residents who forget to renew their permits on time or who park two inches of their back wheels on the swathes of new (and largely purposeless) yellow lines that always accompany the introduction of any CPZ.

4)Where residents are opposed make sure that they respond to the official consultation. In our CPZ the percentage of residents (of the ultimate CPZ area) who voted in favour of the proposal was 16%, and against 8%. 74% did not respond. Based on those numbers the final consultation report concluded that "a strong majority" had voted in favour of the CPZ proposals. The report is in fact riddled with dishonest statements and misuse of statistics, but the lesson is this: we let the council do this to us. We failed to mobilise the vote and we did not properly scrutinise and challenge the consultation report at the right time.


Colin Harrison