Agenda item

Question from Carolyn Daly, Resident

"The residents of Peterborough Villas are now locked in whether it is a car or a bicycle they are driving it's become very difficult to enter or exit Peterborough villas, not to mention the noise and pollution the residents are experiencing. The residents of Peterborough Villas were not included in the initial informal consultation although they are clearly the residents most adversely impacted by the gridlock on Bagleys Lane. What was the criteria for the first consultation as it seems that only those benefiting from the closure were consulted?"

Answer from Councillor Wesley Harcourt, Cabinet Member for the Environment

“Thank you Ms Daly, thank you for your question and thank you for coming along tonight and for your patience in waiting.

The Council, as my colleagues have already said, always endeavours to hear the widest number of people's views when it develops policy but in this particular case it wasn’t actually a requirement for Peterborough Villas to be part of this particular consultation.

I am sorry to hear what you’ve said and I’ve seen any number of letters from people from Peterborough Villas making a similar point. I’ve read them, I’ve listened to them and I’ve asked Highways officers to go away and look at those traffic issues around Peterborough Villas and see what they can do by way of mitigation.”

Supplementary question

“I’d like to know what your vision is for the future - are you taking into account all the increased traffic that’s come in to the gasworks plant - are you taking into account the pollution level that’s been put in there, and that’s going to increase with this? What is your long term goal for the families, the children, the seniors, and all the other residents that live in that area - minus the thirty houses that have an empty street now? It’s all been condensed into one area, instead of being spread - we have trucks, I timed todays, I know you’ve done lots of data… it’s not consistent data. It’s never been the same test monitoring more than once, so how are you going to solve this and what’s the vision for the future?”

Answer to the supplementary question

“Thank you very much for that follow up question.

Our vision for the future - the immediate issue that we had to deal with was the volume of traffic and the number of accidents that there have been in Harwood Terrace.”

“They were having up to 400 vehicles per hour at peak times going through that. And there were a number of accidents at the junctions with Waterford Road and Edith Road so we wanted to try and resolve that as an immediate problem. Yes, there are issues coming out with the gasworks site, there are plans for that and there’s plans for a road to go through the middle of it which will eventually resolve some of these problems. That’s a couple of years away, but we felt at the time, looking at all the traffic data that we had at the time, that it was necessary to look at this as an experiment to see what the impact was.

It is an experiment for six months - and we will be going away and looking at the wider area as a whole.”