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Winchmore Hill Residents Association is a non-political group run by residents, who seek to protect the quality of life in Winchmore Hill, now and for future generations

Fox Lane Update

The Fox Lane report by the council was published recently and we understand Enfield council have already made their intention clear for the scheme to become permanent. The piece below is a summary of the report by our President and Transport representative on the committee Robert Taylor. It was written before the council declared that they intend to make the scheme permanent earlier this week.

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The latest news is that the Council officers’ report  about this traffic scheme has been published. Council Leader, Cllr Nesil Calliskan, will soon take a decision whether to approve this report’s main recommendation, that this LTN scheme should be made permanent.

She has recently approved making permanent a similar LTN scheme for the Bowes area. So, it’s extremely unlikely she will do anything other than decide that the Fox Lane LTN should also be made permanent.

It is quite likely that the Council’s Overview and Scrutiny Committee will then get the opportunity to decide what happens next. It could ratify her decision, or it could refer it back to the Council for further consideration. As this committee has a majority of Labour councillors, it’s almost certain that it will approve the scheme.

So, what’s in this 497 page report?

Paragraph 4 of the reports says, “Taking into account the various matters set out in this report, it is considered that the factors in favour of making the experimental traffic orders permanent outweigh the disbenefits and/or disadvantages of removing the trial.”

Paragraph 6 sets out some measures that might be carries out to mitigate some of the effects of the scheme. These include minor changes at Southgate Circus and possibly a major reconstruction of this junction, but only if funding for this could be obtained from Transport for London.

Investigations could be carried out into removing the existing restriction on most traffic travelling throughout the length of The Medway, or for it to operate only during certain hours of the day.

The report also states that the traffic speeds on The Bourne in the morning peak period have decreased from 29 mph to 17 mph, which is likely the result of congestion at Southgate Circus.

Also interesting is what’s not in this report. There are no details of anything that was written in 2755 e-mails that were received before July 2021 – because demographic information was not available about the writers. A further 1315 emails were received after date but none of the information in them was used either. The report only looks at the comments on the on-line survey, despite residents having been informed by the Council that they could also submit their views by e-mail.

Worst of all the objections submitted by WHRA is not included in the list of submission from local organisations.

The comments that were looked at were only analysed in order to produce lists of the numbers of people who liked or disliked various features and effects the scheme. There were no figures for the numbers of people who were actually in favour of the retention of the whole scheme or how many people wanted it removed.

The jiggery pokery that went on in relation to traffic counts was unbelievable. In several instances before and after traffic counts were caried out at different locations in the same road. Some of the counts were done on days last September when traffic flows were known to abnormally low because of long queues at petrol stations.There is photographic evidence that automatic traffic counting equipment was installed on some roads but no counts from these roads for those dates have been included in the report.

All things considered, the Winchmore Hill Residents Association is very dissatisfied and disappointed with this report.

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Robert has also sent a letter on behalf of the association to Enfield to make clear our views on this report and the findings as well as the fact that the WHRA comments were not included or acknowledged in the report.

You can see a pdf copy of this letter here



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