Your say on your local area

Use empty premises to locally produce food.

Planning is important for protecting local residential areas against damaging developments.  In my area the local businesses and major landowner have joined forces to form an Area Forum. Hardly any residents heard about it as for several years while forming this organisation they refused to do a mail-drop to all the residents.   They devised a neighbourhood plan, much of which sounded great, but which actually is weak as far as protecting residential amenity goes.  Many of the local businesses are estate agents, property companies, and so-on.  Residents' interests come a poor second to business interests.   The government trumpeted planning law changes as improving local democracy, but in reality they did the opposite.  We desperately need the mayor to improve residents' quality of life protection in the London Plan, with regard to hours of noise, levels of noise, types of development.  We need local councils to be made to use electric cleaning machines and waste collection vehicles.  We need some way of preventing the destruction of distinctive architecture and its replacement by the boring, banal and bland.  

As a tenant/member of a fully mutual housing cooperative, I feel that I have a say in my housing, and 
I think many others could benefit by having strong tenancy groups who can actually influence decision making. It would be nice to feel the same about my local area. I live near the border of a different borough, so planning permissions only apply to half my local area, and although I can see them online or in a library, I don't really understand them. 
And another thing-  we are losing our local wildlife, insects and birds in particular (the foxes are fine!).

There is a lot of lip service paid to climate crisis etcetera, but even though everyone goes on and on about greening and ecology, there has been an enormous amount of building in my immediate area in the last 3 years, and all the little "scrubby" shrubs and corners have gone, which means nowhere for the birds to live. Mature trees are left, but all the linking vegetation has "been tidied up" and is planted by professional gardeners, or landscapers who plant and abandon. It ends up like a monoculture with no room for insects and grubs (bird food). We even had a letter from the council telling us to cut back our bushes in the front garden, just when the winter honeysuckle was in flower (pollen source for bumble bees) and had to cut the flowers off.
I would love to see some open areas, even small ones, where we can sit and do some lightweight guerilla gardening, and where native plants are allowed to grow (weeds to the corporate gardeners).