Better Streets forced to continue legal steps to bring back safe infrastructure – Better Streets for Kensington and Chelsea

18th June, 2020

Dear Councillor Campbell, dear Elizabeth,
You will no doubt be aware that we have had no choice but to proceed with a Judicial Review of your decision not to re-instate the cycle lanes that you unlawfully removed just weeks into a trial scheduled to last up to 18 months.
Our claim papers were issued in the High Court and served this week.
We take no pleasure whatsoever in being forced into this course of action. Your continued inaction on this matter however leaves no option. The chronology of events is now well known – a safe cycle lane finally installed in the autumn of 2020 after at least a decade of consideration, removed at the beginning of December after just seven weeks. You refused to listen to our pleas to pause and reflect, but rather ripped it out using a “special urgency” procedure rushed through just hours before a full Council meeting.
Because your decision was manifestly unlawful, you responded early in January to our pre-action protocol letter saying that you would revisit this decision in March. We wrote to you on 16th March pointing out the obvious shortcomings of the report you had put together, and your clear intent to kick the issue into the longest grass you could find. As predicted this is what you tried to do at your meeting of 17th March, coming up with a ruse to look at transport patterns of some sort or other after COVID, and after international tourism had returned – which in turn might inform some sort of other study. Understandably this cover story has become the RBKC equivalent of the Barnard Castle eye test.