Residents Anger over Parking Changes in Tower Hamlets

Explainer to petition to full council raising concerns about the proposed parking changes by Tower Hamlets Council, which come into full effect on the 1st of September 2020.

“History repeats itself first as tragedy then as farce”

Karl Marx

The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

Once again it appears that residents mainly from the working-class background are up in arms, this time it is about the proposed parking changes by Tower Hamlets Council, which are due to come into effect on the 1st of September. In a nutshell, the proposed changes mean that residents cannot park more than three hours in the day outside their immediate mini zone when Tower Hamlets brings in its new rule.

The parking changes, affect the most vulnerable in our Borough. For many access to a car is not a choice but a necessity. Changes brought in, what appears without an Equality Impact Assessment.

Most troubling for many is that the proposed changes affect carers in our Borough. Many of our working-class elderly and vulnerable residents rely on extended family members for support and care. Care ranging from trips to the doctors, shopping, to help with housework, gardening and general care. Many who are still shielding in their homes from Covid-19.

This is a practice that has been with us for generations in the East End of London. Multiple generations of a family living nearby if they can’t live in the same household, supporting each other through the hardship of low income and relative poverty.

In 1957, Lord Michael Young along with Peter Wilmott wrote published their seminal work, “Family and Kinship in East London”, where they acknowledge a world rich in social relationships, networks of dependence and mutual support that were central to the people’s resilience in facing the adversity of insecure and low paid employment.

“Family and kinship in East London” is based on three years of fieldwork done in Bethnal Green in the early fifties, interviewing the residents about their family and social lives. Young and Willmott examined a community that was in the early stages of radical change as the London County Council began their project of postwar slum clearance.

The work was a comparison of two communities, one in Bethnal Green, Tower Hamlets and the other in Debden. One with a thriving social network, the other not so. The street life of Bethnal Green is said to be dominated by ‘mateyness’ and bonhomie, whereas at Debden social relations are said to be ‘window to window, not face-to-face’. The authors called for caution in public policy in order to preserve what they saw as a close-knit and strong community.

It appears lessons have not been learnt and policies are being implemented, which on the face of it, threatening the support networks which many of our vulnerable working-class residents rely on. The irony being it appears that the proposed parking solutions are ones that were first applied in Waltham Forest, down the road from Debden.

#WeAreNotDebden