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Will Norman addresses Newham councillors

Dr Will Norman, the mayor of London’s Walking and Cycling Commissioner, spoke to Newham council at their October meeting about the impact that policies to reduce traffic and improve air quality have had. This is the speech he gave, lightly edited to improve readability online*.

Thank you, Chair, and a massive thank you to the whole council for inviting me here the this evening. It’s a privilege to be here.

I’m going to start on a somber note. Last year, 110 people were killed on London streets through crashes and collisions. Over 3,500 people were seriously injured in the last three years. There have been 15 fatalities on Newham’s roads, and over 4,000 people have been hurt.

Now you, as councillors, will know the tragedy that that brings to people’s families, to their friends, to colleagues and to communities. These are violent, random deaths that bring misery to thousands of Londoners on an annual basis.

The good news is that those numbers are falling.

Last year was the lowest year on record outside the pandemic for fatalities and London’s number of collisions are falling four times faster than the national average. And I’m here today to say thank you to everybody in this room for playing your role. Your rollout of a 20 mph limit across the borough has had an incredible impact.

We’ve done some research now looking at the impact that council decisions have made on the on the lives of Londoners.

We saw a 40% fall in fatalities thanks to your policies.

We saw 34% fall in the number of people being seriously injured thanks to your 20 miles an hour policies.

Astonishingly, we saw a 75% fall in the number of kids being killed on London’s roads due to your 20 miles an hour policies.

And there’s a huge amount of evidence of the benefits that these are bringing. They are not having an impact on journey times. They’re having an impact on air quality. They are saving lives, due to all your hard work.

There are literally people walking around Newham today who wouldn’t have been, had it not been for the efforts of everybody in this chamber.
It’s not just the 20 miles an hour that’s having an impact. If you look at your fantastic healthy street schools programme, it’s another success.

And I’d like to congratulate everybody in the room for their work on this too. 51 of your 127 schools have got us got a school streets program.

The evidence shows that you’ve seen a significant fall in the volume of traffic. The feedback from people within Newham means that it’s they feel safer and calmer to walk their school or their kids to school across the whole capital. Because of your hard work, we’ve beaten our target of 58% of kids to walk to school on a daily basis – which far exceeds the national targets – and it far exceeded our expectations. So we’ve had to set a new target because of all your good work.

But it’s not just that kids are safer going to school on their way to school and their way back. It’s having an impact in their schools.
I don’t know if any of you have ever seen a child have an asthma attack. It is genuinely terrifying seeing a small child struggling to breathe, to struggle to get air.

Our air quality contributes to that on a daily basis. So we put air quality monitors inside some of the schools around London to look at the impact.

I’ll show you the benefits that your policies are having on children with these with the in these schools. The graph there shows that there is obviously an improvement in air quality at drop off time and pick up time. Now that would make sense, because that’s when the school streets in operation. But the genuine change that that graph shows is that air quality throughout the entire school day is better, not just a drop off time, not just a pick up time.

That means that every school, every kid in those 51 schools across Newham is breathing in cleaner air the whole time they are at school.

So again, thank you, that is also contributing to the change in air quality across London. That means fewer asthma attacks and all the problems associated with that across the city.

When we started this journey, I think we were told it would take 194 years to make London’s air legal. Can you believe that almost 200 years to make London’s air legal?

Collectively, thanks to the work in this of everyone in this room and at Transport for London and the mayor and all the other boroughs, we’ve done that in nine.

So thank you. You are saving lives on that. But it’s not just road safety, it’s not just air quality. The health benefits of the policies that you’re implementing are having an astonishing impact.

I was talking to Chris Whitty, the Chief Medical Officer for the UK, the other day. He said that active travel is having more of an impact than anything else on the outcomes and inequalities in health.

Last week, I was out with the Mayor and Councillor Morris to open the new bike lanes and transformation of the North Woolwich corridor. We heard from secondary school kids who were walking to school safely. We saw cyclists moving along there safely, and that is contributing to a huge boost in cycling across London.

You collectively in this room, are making kids healthier. You’re stopping those asthma attacks, you’re reducing heart disease, you’re reducing diabetes, you’re reducing cancer, you’re reducing depression, you are contributing to a healthier London, a healthier Newham, and everybody is benefiting from that.

So I remind you again, as a consequence of your hard work, there are people walking around this borough today, right now, this evening, who wouldn’t have been had it not been for the policies you’ve implemented. So I want to say, on behalf of the Mayor of London and on behalf of the residents of London, thank you.

Keep up the good work.

We’ll keep supporting you, but the impact that you are making is genuinely astonishing, and you should be proud of it.

The long and short of it is that policies that discourage unnecessary car journeys and encourage active travel SAVE LIVES. Better air quality means better health. Fewer cars on the road means fewer collisions, fewer injuries, fewer deaths. 

In next year’s elections some candidates will stand on a platform of rolling these policies back. They will claim to be speaking for residents, for ‘the people’. But evidence shows that doing so – cancelling healthy school streets, rolling back people friendly streets, reverting to a 30 MPH speed limit – will cost lives. People who are walking around our borough today won’t be in a year or two if we step back into the past.

Please, think carefully before you vote.

• The actual speech can be seen online on the council’s YouTube channel.

Tags: 20 MPH, Air Quality, Healthy School Streets