News Articles Archive - Page 59 of 153 - Cross River Partnership

We are delighted to announce that CRP partner London Borough of Southwark will be joining the Clean Air Villages 4 (CAV4) programme, starting immediately! They join 25 CAV4 partners, including Local Authorities, Business Improvement Districts, Strategic Agencies and Landowner, as part of the year and a half long project to deliver ambitious Freight Solutions for a Clean Air business recovery from COVID-19.

We look forward to working with the London Borough of Southwark on delivering key sustainable freight initiatives across their targeted area to improve air quality, efficiency and traffic congestion, in turn supporting the borough’s upcoming New Southwark Plan.

For more information about CAV4, please contact CRP Project Manager Kate Fenton.

Labour candidate Sadiq Khan has been re-elected as the Mayor of London for another term after winning 55.2% of the popular vote.

Sadiq Khan has promised “to strain every sinew to help build a better, brighter future for London”. This continues to focus on a green recovery, creating an equal, fairer, and global London, and continuing to promote walking, cycling and public transport.

Congratulations to all candidates for weeks of excellent campaigning during extremely
difficult times, and to Sadiq Khan for his re-election. CRP looks forward to continuing to deliver our innovative Healthy Streets Everyday and Clean Air Thames projects thanks to the Mayor’s Air Quality Fund.

CRP’s Healthy Streets Everyday programme is excited to launch ‘Meaningful Monitoring: Providing the Path to Positive Change’. The report is designed to support Local Authorities, Business Improvement Districts, Landowners and Policy Makers with the implementation of successful monitoring schemes by providing best practice guidance that builds on the knowledge and insights gained from CRP’s own monitoring programme and data analysis expertise.

Many of the streetscape initiatives implemented over the past year have been done so to enable our streets to become ‘healthier’, encouraging walking and cycling, and supporting schemes such as outdoor dining to enable business recovery whilst reducing the likelihood of COVID-19 transmission.

Ensuring that these initiatives are being delivered successfully is essential. Monitoring helps to provide this evidence and can act as a proof of concept for existing or planned interventions, helping to enable wider roll out and even the transition to more permanent, positive change.

By providing case study examples from CRP’s own Vivacity monitoring programme, the report highlights the importance of monitoring to make evidence-based decisions, whilst also showing how data can be used to provide accountability for a scheme’s introduction. We hope that this will help to support the application of further successful monitoring programmes and ensure that the implementation of streetscape initiatives
continue to deliver healthy streets.

CRP is extremely grateful to the Mayor’s Air Quality Fund for making this Guidance Document possible. For further information about Healthy Streets Everyday, please contact CRP Project Manager Fiona Coull.

Join us from 1:15pm – 2:00pm, Thursday 20th May, for Spatial Mapping and Analysis: Benefits for Air Quality, Logistics and Healthy Streets.

For CRP’s fifth Lunchtime Launch event, we are excited to launch our new Urban Logistics Hub Webpage – an interactive mapping tool, developed as a result of our recently published ‘The Potential for Urban Logistics Hubs in Central London’ study. This new tool will increase the number of sustainable last-mile deliveries in Central London, in turn reducing air pollution, congestion and carbon emissions, by supporting freight logistics companies who are actively searching to occupy a location, and supporting owners of sites looking to advertise their spaces to prospective freight companies.

We will also be joined by Dr Rachel Aldred, University of Westminster, to discuss how spatial mapping and analysis can help identify equity and distributional issues related to neighbourhood interventions. Her recent research involves analysis of Low Traffic Neighbourhoods in London in relation to neighbourhood and population characteristics, including age, disability, ethnicity, deprivation, and car ownership, based on Output Areas of several hundred residents. The research highlights how London-wide impacts may mask wide diversity by borough, and the need to monitor such distributions at borough as well as city-level.

If you missed our latest event, ‘Earth Day: Successful Sustainable Development in London’, please see CRP’s YouTube channel for the full recording!

For further information about CRP’s ongoing Lunchtime Launch programme, please contact CRP Project Officer Rachael Aldridge.

This week we are featuring CRP Project Officer Ross Phillips.

I work across the Clean Air Villages 4 and Healthy Streets Everyday programmes, so my role is extremely varied. I have worked on a delivery and service audit with museums, implemented a cargo bike scheme in Deptford, but also helped to produce guidance documents on parklets for business and community resilience, and analysed (a lot) of data for our Vivacity monitoring programme.

It’s great to have a lot of variety in my role that touches on so many facets of air quality, sustainable freight and active travel, and seeing some of our work come to life, such as the cargo bike support of food banks and pharmacies in Deptford. I am excited to continue this into our future projects and continue supporting our partners with interventions to make London cleaner, greener and safer.

London Car Free Day are collaborating with the Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH) and Bloomsbury Air on a new project to reimagine the future of Bloomsbury as London’s first traffic-free neighbourhood that places young people, environmental and social resilience, and active mobility at the heart of urban design. The project will bring together young patients at GOSH, artists, architects, planners and other community stakeholders to re-imagine what Bloomsbury could look like without traffic and an ambitious landscaping strategy through the 2020s.

What would it take to turn Bloomsbury into London’s first traffic-free, landscaped neighbourhood? London Car Free Day are running an online roundtable on 29th April 2021 to discuss how Bloomsbury could build on international examples including Barcelona’s SuperBlock concept, Milan’s conversion of road space into public plazas, and the traffic-free city centre ambitions of Paris, Oslo, and Edinburgh.

In December 2020, the Government began a consultation on a variety of changes to permitted development rights. The outcome of several elements of that consultation have now been published and the associated amendments to the Town and Country Planning (General Permitted Development) (England) Order 2015 (GPDO) have been laid before Parliament in the Town and Country Planning (General Permitted Development etc.) (England) (Amendment) Order 2021.

In essence, the Government has reined back the proposals consulted on by adding floorspace limitations, vacancy and location limitations, having reflected on the consultation responses it received. And as with the permitted development rights for additional storeys to provide new dwellings, introduced in summer 2020, the bold press releases are not inaccurate, but do not flag the hurdles to be overcome before utilising these permitted developments becomes a viable option.

Notwithstanding, Class MA, which will allow very many properties within Class E to change to residential without consideration of impact on the High Street if the proposal is outside of a conservation area and limited consideration if it is within, will be among the most significant planning changes in a generation. Only listed buildings and their curtilage and properties in the most sensitive locations such as World Heritage Sites, National Parks and Areas of Outstanding National Beauty will be excluded from the new PD right. The legislation precludes or requires assessment of loss of retail and office in beautiful and heritage locations, but in no other retail or business destinations. The retail assessment required by the current Class M PD right will fall away.

Delivering housing and the reuse of redundant shopping space are known to be the Government’s priority and the Class MA permitted development right emphasises this.

The coronavirus outbreak has significantly impacted residents and businesses within Westminster and throughout the UK.

12th April was a milestone for businesses in Westminster. The Economic Model Business Survey is open now, and asks a series of questions about how the lockdown has affected you. Westminster City Council hope to hear from a wide range of businesses, of all different types and sizes, and will use feedback to inform their approach to supporting the borough’s recovery.

Please do take the time to respond, as your views are important to the council. The survey is open until 12AM, Sunday 9 May and will take around 10-15 minutes to complete.

At a full council on 21^st April 2021, Westminster City Council’s City Plan 2019 – 2040 was formally adopted and will now become the city’s new Local Plan.

The new City Plan will replace all current policies in Westminster’s City Plan (November 2016) and saved policies in the Unitary Development Plan (2007). The City Plan 2019 – 2040 outlines an ambitious strategy to make Westminster one of the best places to live, work and play. This plan will equip the city to adapt to changes which have been brought about in the last year with appropriate policies aligned to new government guidance and legislation.

The City Plan focuses on creating a city for all to enjoy with more affordable homes, sustainable developments which are conducive to their aim of becoming a carbon neutral city by 2040 and flexible policies which will enable Westminster to continue to be a city of unique character but a contemporary destination for residents and visitors alike.

Electric Vehicle Fleet-centred Local Energy System (EFLES), a CRP project in partnership with UK Power Network Services, Moixa and UPS, was featured in Current± Chats earlier this week. Claire Thompson-Sage, sustainable development coordinator at UPS, discussed EFLES, barriers to transitioning to electric vehicles, and the need for flexibility among other topics.

Read the full article here!

For more information, please contact CRP Project Manager Sefinat Otaru.

Archives: News Articles

London Borough of Southwark Joins CAV4

Sadiq Khan re-elected as London Mayor

New Healthy Streets Everyday Guidance Document

CRP’s Next Lunchtime Launch Event!

CRP’s Staff Spotlight On: Ross Phillips

Bloomsbury 2030 – London’s first traffic-free neighbourhood?

Changes to Planning Permitted Development Rights

Westminster Economic Model Business Survey

Westminster City Council adopted City Plan 2019 – 2040

EFLES April Update