Welcome to the 8 Questions, where we ask senior figures in the sector the questions every business leader and ambitious professional wants answered. In this edition, David Wilson, Climate Response Strategy Manager at London Borough of Lambeth is asked what is the one thing that is essential to delivering sustainability strategies? What do you think leaders need to be thinking about or doing today that perhaps wasn’t part of the equation for leadersfive or ten years ago?
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Figuring out how we currently use our kerbside was no simple task. Systra provided a lot of expertise on this, and the resulting baseline was fundamental to the success of the strategy. “94% of our kerbside is used to manage vehicles, but only 40% of Lambeth households have a vehicle”. This helped make the strategy seem less radical and more about creating a fairer allocation of space.
Gauging the financial implications of significant, borough wide change to the kerbside was also a major challenge. We made good progress here though, and ultimately as an organisation accepted that if we are trying to reduce demand for parking, then we should probably be less dependent on parking revenue.
It seems simple but being really clear about what we’re talking was a challenge for our kerbside strategy (ask a non-transport family member what the “kerbside” is and you’ll understand why).
We’re beginning work on our Road Danger Reduction strategy now, so we’re taking extra care to ensure we properly define our terms, and how road danger fits within wider societal issues. This is as important, if not more important, for this new strategy as it was for the Kerbside.
As transport planners in a local authority, we probably don’t think about long term strategies enough. The Kerbside Strategy sets out our plan for the kerbside by 2030, and that really gave us the scope to define a vision at a scale that wouldn’t have been possible for a typical 3-year plan. There’s absolutely loads of work to do to make our commitments a reality, so we’re making sure we don’t let the dust settle with a kerbside programme manager now part of the team, who will be coordinating the work teams across the council are doing to create our sustainable kerbside.
The strategy is also part of our wider Climate Action Plan, and we’ll be reporting on progress reallocating kerbside space every year as part of the CAP reporting. Our Net Zero ambition isn’t going anywhere, which in turn means our kerbside commitments aren’t either.
I’d advise and climate strategy teams in councils to to have a truly holistic view of the business case for their policies and projects. I’m repeating myself, but I think worth saying again that this means linking our work to everything else a Council is very likely trying to achieve outside climate policies. Our economic situation is not a good one so the business case has to be just as strong as the ambition.
Speaking from a council officer perspective, taking internal engagement seriously I think will help anyone with words like “sustainability” in their job title. We secured buy-in from senior officers by making it clear the kerbside strategy would accelerate the delivery of work across the council, not just transport objectives.
To do the above, I highly recommend working with engagement experts from the outside. If we’re going to be successful in tackling the climate emergency, we need engagement and communications specialist just as much as we need policy experts, otherwise we’ll never have constructive conversation on challenging subjects.
The strategy has been well received by all sorts of organisations, NHS trusts and Town Planning organisations and local community groups picked it up early on. I think this speaks to it’s success in being more than just a transport policy.
10 years ago Lambeth hadn’t declared a climate emergency, I checked recently and 75% of local authorities in the UK have declared a climate emergency too. 10 years ago the IPCC wasn’t producing damning reports on such a regular basis either. On the positive side, we also saw during COVID the ability to make change to our streets quickly – it was an emergency after all. We should keep hold of that mindset as we tackle the climate emergency too
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors. They do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of the CIHT or its members. Neither the CIHT nor any person acting on their behalf may be held responsible for the use which may be made of the information contained therein
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