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Plan for Drivers: No evidence for 20mph and 15-minute cities claims made by government [1]
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Date: 2023-11
The government has no evidence to back up its attack line that Labour and Lib Dem councils are using traffic calming measures to “police people’s lives” or planning “inappropriate blanket use” of 20mph speed limits, documents have revealed.
The debunked claims were contained in the Plan for Drivers, launched last month amid a row over the scrapping of the northern leg of the HS2 railway project.
Introducing it, transport secretary Mark Harper told the Conservative Party conference that the government wouldn’t tolerate the “sinister… idea that local councils can decide how often you go to the shops”. He also referred to “a Labour-backed movement to make cars harder to use, to make driving more expensive, and to remove your freedom to get from A to B how you want”.
The document itself made similar claims, vowing to “stop local councils using so-called ‘15-minute cities’, such as in Oxford, to police people’s lives”.
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But when openDemocracy asked the Department for Transport (DfT) for the evidence behind Harper’s assertions – which echoed a conspiracy theory that the government itself had debunked in March – it couldn’t come up with any.
It could only cite “Oxford as an example of plans to further restrict vehicle movements”.
Oxfordshire County Council (a Lib Dem and Green coalition) and Oxford City Council (which is Labour-led) have rejected claims that their traffic filtering schemes were an attempt to restrict people to certain areas, and said the goal was simply to move vehicles off congested routes at peak times.
The councils said planned low-traffic measures had been conflated with separate plans to ensure more people have access to vital services within walking distance (the so-called “15-minute cities” model), an idea that has been seized upon by international conspiracy theorists and sparked protests and abuse towards staff and councillors.
When asked for details of areas that had planned “inappropriate blanket use” of 20mph speed limits, the DfT was forced to admit: “Information on areas in England that have implemented or planned inappropriate blanket use of 20mph speed limits is not held by the department centrally.” The only example it appeared to hold was that of a national scheme in Wales, where the Labour government has repeatedly pointed out its plans do not not affect all residential roads.
Alexander Nurse, a senior lecturer in urban planning at University of Liverpool, said policies in the Plan for Drivers went against those in the government’s own 2020 transport strategy.
“Councils were all told by the DfT to start doing things about climate change and sustainable travel by the Boris Johnson government,” he added. “It’s ironic now that they’re calling it sinister – they’re criticising their own policy.”
openDemocracy revealed earlier this year how local Conservative groups across England were adopting opposition to low-traffic schemes as a key campaign issue – even when those schemes had originated from their own party.
Green Party co-leader Carla Denyer accused the government of continuing to promote “baseless conspiracy theories”. “The idea that such measures imprison us within our homes and prevent us moving around has been shown to have no validity whatsoever,” she added.
A DfT spokesperson insisted that “over-use” of 20mph zones was a risk. “We are clear that 20mph zones should be considered on a road-by-road basis to ensure local consent, not as blanket measures,” they said.
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[1] Url:
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/plan-for-drivers-15-minute-cities-20mph-oxford-wales-no-evidence-department-transport/
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