Forum topic: Local Elections 2026 warm-up

Arriving before Christmas cards are leaflets preparing us for next year’s local election. Labour’s proposal to crush the cars of people who dump rubbish was most likely a cut and paste editing error rather than proposed policy, but it may gain support. More jarring was the conservative leaflet and its lead to remove LTN’s. LTN’s installed over many years cover a very substantive part of the borough so I’m guessing locally this is more Fox Lane centric, neatly bypassing the Broomfield Road LTN, put in place some years back to stop the 6 to 10,000 vehicles per day which plagued residents of that street and beyond. Also, would Devonshire Square be unwound and reset as a bypass? We should be told about both.

But mostly I was intrigued by the accompanying photo. In it, one direction is totally clear of traffic, whereas the other direction has a totally free bus lane, one motor bike excepted. Between these two vehicles are nose to tail, moving smoothly perhaps or possibly they’re stationary.



What might a reader conclude? For starters that it doesn’t appear to be taken locally. (Just maybe it’s taken from the north Circular looking up Green Lanes towards PG, but hardly LTN territory if so.)  Secondly that there’s no problem at all for traffic wanting to go in one direction, so maybe it’s a seasonal (time of day) trend. Alternatively, maybe there’s road works just out of the picture, or an accident, or … Who knows. It’s certainly easy to imagine all the people in all the visible cars fitting into one bus, which could then scoot down the empty bus lane.

But I imagine the intent is to have a reader think, wow, all those cars stuck on a main road. Far better they could route down residential streets. We could then have a main route free in both directions.

As we were able to read, transport in Enfield is heading south ( Enfield Dispatch 6 November, “Enfield has gone backwards on sustainable transport”) – fewer journeys being made by foot, cycle or public transport and near record traffic miles being covered.  

 I’ve visited four cities in the last couple of months: Bradford, Newcastle, Edinburgh and Lille. Each has or is extending existing significant car control / exclusion spaces. Other major cities are well highlighted in doing similar, Oxford Street being a prime example. There’s method in such madness, and strategies behind it. I think some hard, big world, conservative strategy rather than a simple “this will be good for some drivers” wouldn’t go amiss.  To lead often means making the hard choice, popularism in all its forms invariably doesn’t cut it in the end.

Still on the route of the pre-election warm-ups, my son received a cold call letter from Nige himself outlining Reform’s London election policies and asking he joins the “people’s army”. The picture Nige outlined for London:

• Thousands more police
• Stepping up Stop and search
• Pursuing every burglar and stolen phone
• Prosecuting shoplifters
• Automatic prison for sexual offenders, violence and knife crime – with no early release
• Detaining and deporting illegal immigrants in London

All this against a background where the Met have recruitment and retention issues; prisons are beyond bursting; and the criminal justice system is so backed up that juries might be thrown under a bus, while forgetting to mention that London can’t have its own legal rules / system within England.

Come May, I’d like to see fewer concrete kites being launched and more of "This is an issue, here’s our strategy, and this is what we can (genuinely) do about it – quickly, cheaply and well."

Not sure why you have singled out Reform for this. All the parties promise the earth in their manifestos, knowing they will never deliver. The Labour party have demonstrated this time and again, for example.

Conservative LTN plans were clarified after along chat with a PG candidate: Devonshire Square will be "saved", not because it's liked but because there is no funding to remove it; whereas All of Enfield's LTN's in the borough will be addressed, so eg locally this captures the Broomfield Avenue closure as well as the more recent Lakes scheme. Any CCTV camera controls would be switched off on Day 1 of a Conservative victory, thereafter a street-by-street referendum would take place with a majority deciding the outcome for that particular street. How this would work if say Grovelands were against but Lakeside and Old Park were in favour was far from clear, and not least for Fox Lane residents in such a scenario. These are area wide solutions and to me surely require area wide answers, but seemingly not. It does mean that local resolution would be for the streets themselves and not by car drivers and others living outside of the relevant LTN area. I was left feeling this was less about a strategy but rather into the "war on the car" type dogma. We'll see, or maybe not.  

From memory residents in the busy ‘rat run’ streets nearest Green Lanes were more pro the LTN whereas those in quieter streets such as Conway tended to be against. So we could easily have the scenario where the Old Park Roads, Grovelands etc vote to keep filters - whilst the ‘higher’ streets such as Conway opt to have them removed. The latter’s residents may want to do some vehicle movement modelling before they cast their local election vote.

A report in the Enfield Dispatch reveals that it’s not to be ALL LTNs but only “Labour LTN’s” which would be removed in the event of a Conservative local election victory. An extension of Orwell’s: “Conservative LTN’s good, Labour LTN’s bad”. Identify your own street from the map of Enfield’s LTN’s, determineif you’re a Labour or Conservative LTN and then, well, who knows.



In the same article, the Conservative leader stated, “I detest Labour’s LTNs and I will do everything in my power to remove them.” This self-centric, Trump-like outburst, is noticeable for its absence of any transport strategy, and that surely is the requirement.