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The Gateway News poll has been noticed by residents outside the Gateway News distribution area of North Bexley. Jacqui and Steve Wise from Action Group Against the Bridge and Terry Grant from St. Micheal’s Resident Association, brought their campaign to the council meeting on the 2nd of November to the council meeting with a deputation and series of public questions.
Jacqui Wise, from Bexleyheath, Kent, led the deputation, and submitted a series of supplementary questions, one being; “The Mayor Ken Livingstone recently quoted that nearly 80% of local people support the proposed Thames Gateway Bridge. Results of a telephone poll in the October issue of the Gateway News, a newspaper distributed free to residents in Erith and Belvedere, showed that 69% of people are against the proposed Thames Gateway Bridge compared to 31% in favour. In the light of these results would the Council like to reconsider its position on this proposal?” to which Councillor Chris Ball replied “The Council continued to review its position, but its position in principle was clear and, as he had already said, as the process continues, new facts, new figures, new information comes along. In terms of the article, the survey in the Gateway News based on the responses in September had been 51%/49% in favour of the Bridge and now it had gone the other way”. Councillor Ball did not think a Council should make Council policy based on opinion polls in the local press.
Though Gateway News agrees that decisions should not be based singly on an opinion poll, but believes the council should at least acknowledge the thoughts of over a hundred readers/ residents, who so far who would have voted. The mayor quoted, 80% of local people support the bridge, a figure, derived from a questionnaire, which too can be considered to be a poll, and has some doubt as to the ambiguity of the questionnaire.
“TfL’s rebuttal to Professor Kerry Hamilton, an expert adviser on consultation for objectors, stated, and I quote “It cannot have come as any surprise to local residents that a new river crossing was still being pursued”. We believe that it has come as a surprise to local residents. Does the Council agree that Transport for London’s consultation process was flawed and inadequate and that this derogatory remark from Transport for London to local people is an excuse for their own ineffective consultation?”
Councillor Ball replied that everyone had accepted at the outset of the process that the methodology adopted by TfL was less than desirable and that was one of the things which the Council had picked up. either directly through representations or through Counsel, so Councillor Ball believed there was an issue there. He was not familiar with the particular document which was being referred to, but was happy to look at it and give a fuller response. Councillor Ball stated that as it was a big, long-term strategic development which was being planned with all the controversy around it, should the Council still be considering it? Well probably. Again it could be argued that they were only estimates and projections for 2016 (a bit like the traffic projections that were mentioned earlier on about congestion) but the suggestion of Thames Gateway was that there were potentially 180,000 new jobs on offer to people in the Thames Gateway region, which would be facilitated or assisted by having better transport infrastructure.
Currently, to get across to Newham is complicated and difficult, to Tower Hamlets to the Olympics re-developments, all of those together would provide the opportunity of better quality jobs for people who live in Bexley. Whether or not thousands of new jobs were created in Bexley remained to be seen, but there was that level of potential jobs - 180,000 (even if this were 50% out it was still 90,000) high quality jobs that were potentially on offer to residents of Bexley. That was why Councillor Ball believed Bexley should continue to look at it, but it needed to be looked at in mind of the issues around traffic, environment, health and mitigation. Those were the things that had been discussed by Bexley’s barrister at the Inquiry stage. Those were the things which were discussed at a meeting that was being suggested was some sort of clandestine stitch-up between the Labour GLA Member Len Duval and Bexley. In fact the Conservative Member of the GLA had been present at that meeting as well. Bexley had negotiated with TfL directly to see if it could get a better set of promises and undertakings from them, but at the end of that session they were not prepared to give Bexley what it considered were acceptable levels of reassurance.
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