Planning London’s future

They say recycling is the answer but we don't recycle in Wandsworth. Everything is incinerated or possibly still sold abroad. This needs to stop. Waste management should be a priority. Making refill stations for household cleaning products and personal hygene products like shampoo. Even food items such as rice & pasta could be a refillable option and save on plastic packaging. If the refills were more accessible and affordable rather than a decision made by the privileged few. You could have a place on every estate and parade of shops. It would mean less waste and a more community way of living. Also community growing schemes are things that could be done at a national level.
I sold my car and I am often shocked by the emissions of vehicles. Getting the bus does not seem like a greener option when there are so many with pollution pumping out. More needs to be done. Possibly bio-fuels (but not Palm oil)? Apparently there are ‘ghost' flights: we need to reform historic rights to landing slots.
I try my best but I dispair & give up at times when I see how other people don't. Or that there could be more done by industry to save emissions and carbon.
I'd like to see London looking cleaner and greener. Litter and fly-tipping needs more campaigning.

The storm overflow into the Thames is disgusting! Please stop

We need to mitigate against drought. It is being trailed at the City of London School where they are testing different bedding systems and monitoring the Thames Path. We need greener streets in urban areas to cool them down. Possibly green roofs are the answer as tree planting is not the only solution. If there was less removal of established, veteran and ancient trees with it being acceptable to replace them with sapplings that would be a start. Developments could work around trees a bit more. 1 one hundred year old tree does more for ecology than 1000 sapplings. More for wildlife with bricks for bees and birds and bats being part of developments in future.

Open the roads and let traffic move freely as opposed to the manufactured congestion the current mayor and local councils have created by installing too many cycle lanes & LTNs. The current anti car mentality driven by groups such as London Cycling Campaign needs to stop as it is discriminating working class people, the elderly, disabled & vulnerable in favour of the 2%, mainly white middle class men, who cycle. We saw with yesterday's tube strike, thanks to Sadiq Khan, that our city cannot cope with these draconian schemes. Only better public transport - more frequent & cheaper - will solve the problem. Why should people get out of their vehicles when public transport is so expensive & badly run - again thanks to Sadie Khan. He has to go in 2024!

Please give us the clean air to which we are legally entitled, and give the streets back to the people who live and walk on them, and end the presumed primacy of the motor vehicle. Let's introduce truly dynamic road pricing across the whole city so that the cost of motor vehicle use reflects its impacts - if you must have something delivered or it's essential to drive somehwere, then you bear the cost. And current traffic laws (speed limits, bikes / mopeds on the pavements, school streets etc.) need to be enforced.

I would like to see more investment in the circular economy and changing behaviours over vehicle use. So many car journeys in London are for short distances that really should not be driven! Car ownership has ballooned in the past 20 years and the majority of car have a vehicle for convenience rather than necessity. It is also no coincidence that physical activity levels have dropped significantly and that physical literacy in children has diminished leading to an explosion of non-communicable disease in the adult population. Air quality and physical and mental health of Londoners would be greatly improved if car ownership was exception rather than the norm.

Present households, streets and communities with a range of options for retrofitting houses or making them more energy efficient (from materials for diy draft excluders to air pump boilers). Look at how Civic Square in Birmingham are engaging their local community on these things.

Universities have giant carbon footprints. Encourage them to reduce the carbon footprint of their buildings and work with local communities to find ways to help them work towards a just transition to net zero through things like civic university agreements.

People in London live in cramped housing where it’s really hard to store a bike. Increase access to neighbourhood level bike storage to encourage cycling. The canals offer amazing bike routes across London but their poor infrastructure (eg poor lighting) means they are underused and not equally accessible.

Meet the demands of London Underground workers to prevent tube strikes. I hear more of my peers concerned that they can’t rely on public transport anymore for dependable affordable travel so are opting to buy cars.

Enable more meanwhile spaces in new developments (which always take longer than they expect) or unused buildings to provide more services and amenities close to home so people will travel less. Stop allowing developers to demolish perfectly good buildings.

Local councils seem to be afraid of large street trees (accidents) or find them expensive to maintain. But these are one of the best mitigations for heat you can have. They add cool shade, fresh air and beauty to the area, offer habitat for animals and insects and take up huge amounts of water to prevent flooding. People love them.
Make some effort to stop people paving over their front gardens - losing habitat and contributing to flooding.
All roofs that are suitable should have solar panels - would massively lower our use of fossil fuels and cost of energy. The rest should be painted white to reflect sun - well worth doing.
Finally need to urgently review London’s flood defences. Sea level rise is coming faster than anyone predicted.

I think our planning regulations need to be tightened up so that developers cannot renovate or build new office buildings, education facilities, etc. without proper provision for internal cycle storage and supporting facilities (lockers, showers, drying facilities, etc.).

Get rid of the mayor, would be a lot less hot air and the money saved could keep the tube running

Retrofitting homes to improve insulation is incredibly difficult when they are flats in private leasehold ownership. How to get 2 or 3 leaseholders plus freeholder all to agree on for example external wall insulation or roof insulation which involves access through someone's flat and they don't want the disruption? There need to be changes to building regs to provide leaseholders with a way to oblige co-leaseholders and freeholder to grant permission if works are being resisted by one party. And a public advice service to help with the negotiation and legal arrangements. And why do installers that work with government grant schemes say you can't do ONE flat's external wall insulation when the lease says nothing about what I can or can't do with my outside walls?
Problems like this in leasehold property are a MAJOR impediment to getting external wall insluation and heat pumps installed. What if heat pumps need to go under a shared garden or driveway/forecourt? Regs need to be made to give leaseholders a right of access to underground space if they have a right to pass over it.

For those who don't believe in climate change - your views are irrelevant. The fact is, the way we are living damages the environment, whether by pumping sewage into waterways, polluting the air we breath, creating excessive noise, and maybe, just maybe warming the planet. Let's stop air pollution, let's reduce the money we spend on (and increases taxation on) non-beneficial transport, let's fine/tax companies that don't respect our environment and let's stop looking to raise additonal funding from the masses and start hitting those companies that pay so much, so much to shareholders to boost their share price to boost exec bonuses. This is not socialism, its not anti-capitlism, its just time for a tweak to modem of excess we currently run.

Try to encourage people out of cars and onto cycles and public transport (which is much to expensive). Do not demolish buildings instead go for a refurb, have more open green spaces. Have more (safe) cycle only areas. Give incentives to people to reduce car journeys.

We really need to talk about the Silvertown Tunnel.

Building even more road capacity will simply induce more demand for it, and is exactly the opposite of what we should be doing in the face of the climate crisis. Take this billions and invest on transformative schemes to support Londoners in getting around their city safely and more efficiently.

There is a precedent for cancelling road building schemes even after they are already underway; like the inner London orbital motorway of the 1960s that would have ripped the heart out of many boroughs and put a road like the Westway through the heart of Brixton and many other communities. Cancel the Silvertown Tunnel now - or else be remembered for building the Westway of the 21st century.

Stop seeing the car as the primary mode of transport, improve public transport and make alternatives safer ie bikes, scooters and other micro-transporters.
Cars are the problem but the only way of getting people to volunteer to change is by offering better alternatives - congestion charging doesn't work except as a way of collecting taxes for the Mayor. There is a perfectly acceptable way of taxing use already: a tax on petrol to get people into less polluting vehicles. I would like to see research into mileage - it is ridiculous to see the number of hire vehicles in the West End cruising around empty - paying the same as a car that just crosses thro the West End once - and it is wrong to view EV's as non-polluting - the electricity has to be generated somehow and we now find that tyre degradation is also polluting.
Homes need better insulation, let's offer grants that are more easily accessed. Ditto PV .
Planning should prevent people paving over their entre front gardens - it encourages flooding and is unsightly - say 25% should be retained as planting

I proposed my project to City hall few years ago before the pandemic! My project was about to use the empty spaces owned from TFL to create a space where kids can go and do FREE mediation classes, FREE music classes, FREE cocking classes, FREE martial art classes and during weekend using the space for Art and Music event.

To start the project I would have found the teacher that would volunteer for the classes for FREE! The only thing I need is a space from the Mayor of London!

The space could be powered from wind energy installation.

Please help me to make this project reality and to support our future our kids!

Thank you

The cost of making homes more energy-efficient is prohibitive. We will only see the improvements we need with massive government intervention, going street by street to insulate Victorian walls and lofts and replace gas central heating systems.

The number one priority in tackling climate change right now and which we can do right now, is to cancel the Silvertown Tunnel. It is a very poorly thought through project and it needs to be stopped.

Siân Berry came up with a process to make it’s cancellation affordable recently. Just cancel it. Nobody wants it.