Agendas behind the East Bristol Liveable Neighbourhood

A guest post from Keep Bristol Moving activist, Helen Hughes

The implementation of the East Bristol ‘Liveable Neighbourhood’ scheme, begun at the end of October, has been the cause of quite some kerfuffle in Bristol’s Barton Hill, St George and Redfield. Local residents who had no idea what was coming at them suddenly woke up the fact that Bristol City Council had used a Traffic Regulation Order to close off Beaufort Road to through traffic, the consequences of which have been traffic congestion on other roads to an extent never before seen.

The Stop the East Bristol Liveable Neighbourhood Facebook group soared in membership from just over a hundred to thousands within weeks, and a change.org petition asking for the scheme to be stopped has gathered well over 5,000 signatures, enough of them with Bristol postcodes to have already triggered a ‘debate’ at the recent Full Council meeting.

And hundreds, if not thousands, of residents have been writing to the Council and its ‘Liveable Neighbourhood’ team, verbalising their shock and horror at what is happening to them. The responses to which have been (slight) variations on the theme of ‘Have patience – it’s all going to be fine once the scheme has been fully implemented. The traffic will settle down and in fact disappear because so many people will start walking and cycling instead. This has been proved to have happened everywhere else where such schemes have been implemented.’ So – a stock response that completely fails to listen to the many justified criticisms and concerns.

So why is this? Why is Bristol City Council so insistent that they know best and can safely ignore the people who they are accountable to?

Well, it is perhaps worth knowing that the Department for Transport under Boris Johnson's Conservative Government published this: ‘Gear Change: a bold vision for cycling and walking’, not long after the horror show that was Covid had begun in 2020.

In this ‘bold vision’, it is stated that £2 billion in funding was released for measures that would transform England into ‘a great walking and cycling nation’. Part of the vision was indeed for ‘many more low-traffic neighbourhoods’. ‘The new cycling budget is the largest sum ever committed to active travel in this country’, in order to ‘put cycling at the heart of transport policy’, ‘the great majority of which will be channelled through local authorities’. But the funding is only for schemes that meet ‘the new standards’, which includes making ‘cycle, bus and walking corridors, closing a limited number of main roads to through traffic except for buses and access.’

Further, ‘funding will be conditional on work starting and finishing by specified dates’ - or funds may have to be returned, and ‘Active Travel England's assessment of an authority's performance on active travel will influence the funding it receives for other forms of transport’. In other words, funding for improving public transport will be completely dependent on local authorities first implementing drastic improvements to cycling infrastructure. Well, there we have the possible reason why BCC has been unable to explain why it is engaging in closing roads rather than making it easier for us to travel by bus and train...

Finally, this ‘bold vision’ ends with this paragraph:

Before any specific proposal is put forward, the ground must be carefully prepared, with the public persuaded of the need for change and an attractive alternative to the status quo laid out that people can get interested in – this should relate proposals to things that affect people’s lives directly, not just technical proposals and show why there’s a problem to fix. Articulate a clear vision of what you want a place to look like. Work out every technical aspect of a proposal thoroughly and in detail before you present it, to anticipate and pre-empt likely objections, and get it as right as possible at the beginning. When communicating the proposals be confident about it and absolutely be clear about your intentions, the benefits and disadvantages. Proposals must be clear and unambiguous, as detailed as possible, including good maps and drawings, and frank about the disadvantages, to build trust and discourage misrepresentation.

Make what you will of that, but ‘persuading’ the public that ‘there's a problem to fix’ looks a bit dodgy, don’t you think?

Evidently, these ‘liveable neighbourhood’ schemes come from at least as far back as central government and use funding in such a way that local councils almost have no choice but to pursue them, whilst making bizarre efforts to persuade people they are listening to them (when they are obviously not) in order to gain some kind of legitimacy. Throw into that mix a few single-agenda 'climate activists' elected as councillors and appoint one of them to the chair of a relevant committee, and here in Bristol, Ed's your uncle, so to speak.

The on-loop repetition of ‘we have to use the funding’ now makes a bit more sense when seen from the council's point of view, though in reality it makes no sense whatsoever to most residents of East Bristol.

So this is why we get the stock responses and the complete refusal to budge - apart from replacing the odd planter with way more expensive ANPR cameras (not a great win from our perspective - ‘1984’, anyone? Are people really okay with Stasi-level surveillance being the norm in England?).

And it’s hats off big time to the wonderful people out there on the streets preventing the poor old constructors working. Maybe there really is no other way of stopping this insanity. Thank you lot so much!