Southwark Council postpones consultation on road closures until May

News is trickling out about the Council’s public consultation. In a recent email to a resident, Council leader Cllr Kieron Williams says the consultation is now not going to take place until early May, presumably after the Mayoral Election on 6 May. This means the road closures in Dulwich, which the Council said in June 2020 could be modified or removed within six months, will stay in place unaltered until late summer or autumn 2021.

This will be devastating news for those who have been asking for the 24/7 closures to be modified to allow better access – including all three emergency services; health professionals like GPs, midwives and carers; and local shops and businesses that have experienced such a sharp drop in trade since the closures went in that they are extremely pessimistic about the future. 

It also means that the Council expects residents and schools on what they are calling the ‘displacement routes’ to put up with unacceptable volumes of traffic and illegal levels of pollution for at least another six months.

Cllr Williams says that a newsletter will be sent to all properties, including businesses, in the ‘review area’ and to ‘all properties either side of boundary roads’. It’s not entirely clear what this means, as the review area hasn’t been defined, but it suggests that the Council may be ignoring the scale of traffic displacement in the Dulwich area – the effects on Underhill Road and Rosendale Road, for example, of closures and restrictions in Dulwich Village.

The newsletters Cllr Williams mentions will direct people to a ‘consultation hub’ where there will be links to separate surveys for Dulwich Village, East Dulwich and Champion Hill. Each newsletter will have a unique reference number to distinguish between those living inside LTNs and anyone else who submits a survey, and will contain details of where hard copies of the survey can be accessed. It isn’t yet clear how many people can respond from each household, or whether responses will be limited to those over 18.

We have been promised a process that is clear and transparent. 

This dribbling out of incomplete information does not inspire confidence.