A new Green London council leader has said he wants to make it “more difficult” for people to drive their cars as he laid out his vision for the borough.
Jame McAsh outlined his plans for Southwark, including increasing affordable housing, tackling the climate emergency and resisting immigration raids.
He said that some measures his administration will propose will be controversial but insisted he is willing to make “difficult choices” to improve the lives of residents.
“Londoners are dying from extreme heat, and when it comes to the winter, we'll be expecting extreme weather in other ways, flooding, etc,” Mr McAsh told the Standard.
“So we need to react to that. But being a Green is also about kind of the space that we're in.
“So we want to see a lot more trees. We want to make it safer for kids to walk and cycle to school, and that means reducing traffic.
“It means taking action to, you know, not just make it easy to walk and cycle, but also make it more difficult to drive your car around.
“And sometimes those are difficult choices. But if that's what we believe, we kind of need to take those kinds of actions.”
Changing the way people travel around the borough could include blocking off “rat runs” and increasing the number of low traffic neighbourhoods (LTNs) and school streets, Mr McAsh said.
He added: “Tony Benn, a hero of mine, talked about a signpost and weather vanes, and a weather vane moves around in the wind, and a signpost points the right direction.
“And I firmly believe that yes, we need to engage the community. Yes, we need to talk to people about how we're doing things.
“We also need to have something we're trying to achieve. And for me, traffic reduction is something we need to achieve.
“It's important for kids, first of all, being able to walk and cycle around safely without being run down, but also so that their lungs aren't being clogged up with poisonous gasses.
“It's about the climate emergency as well. It's about tackling this existential crisis that we're facing, but it's also about people's just general health and mental health.”
Labour was ousted from Southwark council at the local elections in May, with the borough now run as a coalition between the Greens and Liberal Democrats.
Mr McAsh is the leader at the town hall and Lib Dem Victor Chamberlain his deputy.
The coalition wants to support more affordable housing developments and to bring down the cost of living for residents.
This includes looking at the thousands of empty homes, including hundreds which belong to the council, and seeing how they can be brought back into use.
There are more than 20,000 families currently on Southwark council's social housing waiting list and the local authority is managing over 4,000 households placed in temporary accommodation.
Mr McAsh, a former Labour councillor who defected to the Greens, said: “We're seeing families or couples moving out when they want to raise families, and the people who are here are having to make compromises in terms of how they live their lives.
“So affordability is something that runs through everything we want to achieve, and that means the really big picture stuff.
“It means looking at the housing capacity. It means looking at affordability.
“It means looking at how we make sure we're getting more affordable homes, but also how we're working with the private sector, private rented sector as well.
“But then it also means doing some ultra local practical things and making it easier for kids to get secondhand school uniforms, which we know is a real challenge.”
Green-run London town halls have have already said they will attempt to ban their officers from cooperating with Home Office immigration enforcement teams.
Lewisham councillors last month approved plans to begin refusing to assist with illegal working raids in the borough “wherever legally possible”.
Mr McAsh said his borough had already stopped working with the Home Office immigration teams.
“My understanding is that by and large, we're already doing that,” he said.
”To be clear on that, the council does not share information regarding immigration raids or participate in immigration raids, and the only information we share is the kind of the generic statistical information that's statutorily required.”
