Shaping London’s economic future

The Mayor of London, doesn't give a fig for Londoners. All he wants to do is continually tax Londoners more by instigating more and more revenue generating from the motorist. Interfering with local councils to introduce more & more buildings, to turn Bexley into a Ghetto. The Green Belt was instigated to prevent the growth of London into the Suburbs.

This Mayor Is totally out of touch with Londoners

My local High Street is excellent as a retail, personal services and hospitality area, but parallels a major trunk road and consequently becomes a traffic sewer filled with rat runners whenever the main road is (or threatens to become) congested. Suddenly the High Street’s attractiveness evaporates. It would benefit enormously from being restricted to buses, pedestrians and cyclists at various points, making through traffic a thing of the past. When I see car free areas in towns like Chichester or city streets like Lambs Conduit I wonder why such obvious successes can’t be widely imitated elsewhere. Similar cases, local to me, are Richmond and Kensington High Street, both centres I try to avoid visiting if there’s not a dire necessity. 

An additional comment. The plethora of badly driven food delivery motor scooters and e-bikes are an anti-attraction and may dissuade some from visiting and spending money locally. 

I think we have a wonderful city with fantastic potential. 

London on a whole needs attention and funding especially away from zone 1 / tourist hot spots. My local high street has so many closed and empty shops, with very specific shops opening daily (barber shops for some reason) there’s no mix of retail anymore and even bigger companies like Tesco and boots have recently withdrawn retail space from my local high street. 

 Central London appears to be deteriorating which I notice on my commute and when venturing in to socialise and shop. I am concerned about the number of shops closing, the vast amount of vape and souvenir shops, as well as the the rickshaws all over the place regularly endangering pedestrians. 

I worry about the safety of our city in both central  and Greater London. Phone theft is entirely out of hand now. 

I realise all of these problems above cannot be resolved quickly nor easily but I  hope the new chapter for the country means London as well as the rest of the UK gets the attention and funding required to make it the city we all know and love again! 

Not considered in the survey is noise and pollution from the trains and nearby industrial work. It greatly impacts my quality of experience and 

I am an old age pensioner.

I am 81 years old so some of the questions in the survey were difficult for me to answer because they were aimed at people who are young enough to be employed or run a business.  However, it was an interesting survey.

Trying to take a disabled person shopping or to appointments is a joke no where to park plant pots in the road and no entry’s everywhere a 15 minute journey now takes 40 minutes roadworks should all be done at night but seeing as everyone thinks the car is the devil drivers have no chance even now your goner charge electric car drivers congestion 

I am in a wheelchair. No public disabled toilets are suitable for me. The standard 'document M' design does not work for wheelchair users who cannot walk. Caroline Russell did London wide survey on the accessibility or not of public disabled toilets that has gone nowhere. The much vaunted changing places are not suitable for wheelchair users as there are no grab rails - they are designed for people with two carers, one on either side.

A division of Arup was commissioned By the Department for levelling up  to come up with an improved design. It never saw the light of day.

The existing design does not work for people unable to go from sitting to standing. The grab rails are in the wrong place. One is on the wall to your left but too far back. The other grab rail on your left is too far forward to reach.

As a result of not being able to use public disabled toilets, I and others cannot leave home for more than a few hours. My worldis like living in a shoebox.

Secondly, the design of buses does not work for most disabled people in wheelchairs or mobility buggies. The notic0es on the bus tell you to face backwards. This means you cannot reach the blue button to alert the driver to stop. These buses were never tested by anyone actually in a wheelchair!  Please can someone in a wheelchair test the designs of buses before they are put into production.

Thirdly, please can the person in each borough borrow a power wheelchair and go up and down all the pavements in the borough? They would then realise how bumpy they are and how dropped curbs are often too steep to be used.

All it takes it is to experience what the consumers have to put up with. There are entire boroughs that are inaccessible, e.g. Haringey and much of Westminster.

Are you guys there okay? How dare you to ask such questions?! What is the minimum wage? So how on earth someone with minimum wage will be ever able to secure themselves a permanent home in London? Maybe it's time to stop selling London to china and middle east? How about to limit 1 property per person at least in London? Your survey is a spit in a face of those who are barely making ends meet!  

I just don't feel safe in my local High Street. It's simp y lawless. And you take your life in your hands with all the bikes, many motorised, tearing along delivering food items. The same goes for the local bus stops where you have to step onto cycle lanes to get to the pavement. It's so dangerous. How on earth are people with pushchairs meant to check it's safe to get off the bus? Was no thought given to personal safety when these things were designed?

The bigger problem with London is the private and commercial landlords charging crippling rents. We have too much litter, too many professional beggers  and pickpockets, and far too many prolific thieves. Wandsworth Town is full of non working persons, of working age, who are simply sponging from the state. There are jobs out there if you want one. The Wandsworth bid scheme charge my company money for the local community and spend it how they like but don’t promote the business that they demand the  money from! Most busses that pass my office, it’s a main route , are empty even during rush hour! 

I live in Wandsworth. 
There is no large Marks and Spencer seeing clothes/home products in the borough. There is no department store. There are now mostly shops for things you can’t do on line like nail bars, hairdressers, computer repairs, tanning salons and charity shops. And of course coffee shops and restaurants. We need to encourage and support independent businesses. We need variety. We need market stalls that don’t sell at premium prices.

Battersea Power Station is accessible to disabled people but parking is not free. 

The infra structure is incompatible with the numbers of people-roads are jammed and bus lanes are either empty or full with half empty buses. Cyclists are careless (ear plugs in, no helmet or high viz jacket, using a phone) ditto e-scooter users. 

There’s lots to do to revive the local economy. 
 

There is a lot to be improved in London. It is ridiculously expensive for both essential things for life such as rent (for home) and business rates, transport. It is also really expensive to have any social life as pubs are now prohibitively expensive - at least twice as expensive for a pint of beer for example.(£6.00 - £7.00 a pint). Lots of people depend on these things for social company and the avoidance of loneliness. Pubs have closed and Southwark council appears insensitive to the expensive commercialisation of the area at the expense of social cohesion. Even the parks are increasing paid events which suit those with money but cater to a limited audience.

The local high street (Walworth Road) doesn't have a single clothes store since M&S closed. It's a vast empty space. We have numerous coffee shops and small cafe's and some good hardware stores We also have numerous charity shops which sometimes charge as much for items as if they were new.

East street market is pretty good and offers value for money but where are the facilities for poor young people.

I am retired and now have mobility problems with my knees which have opened a whole new world to me. Things II wasn’t aware of are now glaringly obvious.

Bus pass was great but now buses are out of bounds as  cannot get legs in seats. Special seats are too low and no leg room. Nowhere to put shopping. Drivers do not stop next to kerb most times so cannot get off. New electric bus 450 badly designed

When will designers get the picture that people are taller now. Older people need higher seats not lower so they can get up.

This has impacted a lot on going far and very frustrating. Trains are easier to get on and off but penge east at end of my road have stairs across so difficult .room for ramp but never installed. Did my back in years ago carrying pushchair over it. Still the same.

Could go on and on but frustrating as I love going out and about.

I'm 70, single, a retired community worker. My housing association rent  is £195pw, which takes 90% of my state pension. The new government has just cut my Winter Fuel Allowance so I'm even poorer than three weeks ago. I worked for 50 years before retirement on a lowish wage, so have small savings that are melting away. I have no future in the capital, it's unaffordable for me. The "social contract" between everyday working people and wider society has broken for pensioners.

Your survey did not take into account the needs of older retired people who depend on decent public transport whether buses or trains - it is rubbish  in this part of outer south London. You always assume London equals inner London north of the Thames and forget outer London south of the Thames where we do NOT have the tube, do NOT have the Overground and do NOT have the tram. Already the GLA is talking of taking out the SL7 bus - our only regular sub orbital transport route, and the only one that takes us to Heathrow airport.  Town centres depend on decent transport routes - we need improvements not reductions. As a result we lack decent shops, educational and job opportunities, as well as cultural opportunities.  The GLA only spends £72 on each person in this Borough compared with £3,000 per person in places like Camden etc.  No wonder we are so disadvantaged and the gap is getting wider. Please take us into account and not reject or ignore us!

Economic development continues to take place at the expense of communities' and residents' local living environment - noise pollution increases, air pollution increases, it becomes more and more impossible to sleep through a single night without being woken up by deliveries, rat-running gigantic private waste collection vehicles, by the endless racing 'supercars', by revellers yowling their way their way home at all hours.  This is so unnecessary - it actually is entirely possible to make sure that economic development is fully integrated with packages of measures that improve residential 'amenity' or liveability.  This should be made mandatory, somehow. Residents' needs for a healthy living environment should have much much greater weight and priority in GLA and local authority policies.  The London Plan must surely address this imbalance, make sure the local environment is improved, rather than economic success bringing the deterioration that it has so far. And it is not just economic development that brings problems - dockless e-bike trial parking has been, stupidly, allowed in residential streets. This brings an instant crash in local liveability - noise round the clock from nocturnal servicing and e-bike dumping by companies, gangs of ASB youths riding e-bikes at speed on pavements, shrieking and yelling, noisy people playing on them at night right outside residents' bedroom windows, etc. Residents needs are just not in policy-makers minds at all, it seems.  Each business expansion, each new business, brings deliveries (diesel), waste & recycling collections, customers arriving in taxis and cars, and there is not enough 'amenity' protection to prevent these from happening between 9pm and 7am in residential streets.  Stop dumping it all on the residents, GLA, Mayor, and City Hall staff.

No longer feel safe going out anymore-everyone I know including myself has been a victim of crime. And ulez is just a money making scheme. Khan is the worst mayor ever.