Shared Spaces

Lord Low of Dalston Excerpts

Thursday 15th October 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Low of Dalston (CB)]

My Lords, I, too, congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Holmes, on securing this debate and bringing this matter again to your Lordships’ attention. I say “again” because, as he observed, I introduced a QSD in remarkably similar terms about five and a half years ago, but to very little effect. The Minister, whom I knew to be a very sensible man, asked me in advance what I hoped to get out of the debate, but then went on to comprehensively shaft me in his wind-up speech. Sensible or not, he had simply swallowed his departmental brief whole. Afterwards, Lord Jenkin, who is also a very sensible man, said to me that he had learnt two things in life: one was to keep pegging away and the other was that it always pays to make a fuss. I intend to make a fuss.

The noble Lord, Lord Holmes, has done us all a signal service by putting his effort where his mouth is and carrying out some actual research on the matter, which he has written up into a report with the singularly apposite title Accidents by Design. This has been hailed by a member of the National Federation of the Blind in the following terms:

“This damning blitz on a pet concept for professional streetscapers to impose on the public realm has been shown up as unpopular with people, impractical for our high streets and even mis-reported on by the media … The eloquence and focus of the Holmes Report must read like a breath of fresh air, not only to blind and partially sighted people but, indeed, to a third of the public, whom the Report found actively avoid shared space”.

As we have heard, the idea behind shared space schemes is that, if you remove the traditional demarcators of separate space for pedestrians and motorists, such as kerbs, railings and controlled crossings and, as Ben Hamilton-Baillie, the arch-evangelist for shared space, has put it, fully integrate traffic into urban design so that pedestrians are expected to mingle interchangeably with cyclists, cars, buses and 10-tonne lorries, a “more ambiguous environment” will be created—you can say that again—which, being difficult to interpret and with the risk that pedestrians may be sharing the same space, encourages motorists to drive more cautiously and courteously.

That is not how it appeared to me when I went to see it in action outside Sloane Square tube station with the then chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Eye Health and Visual Impairment. All went well for a while, but—sadly, just after she left—a car came charging through the shared space area, obviously oblivious to the fact that it was a shared space, and went slap into another car, with a great deal of effing and blinding in consequence. Mr Hamilton-Baillie tells us that shared space has now become,

“an accepted approach to street design in many countries”,

and that the UK, having started very late, is now beginning to take the lead.

As we have heard, it is expected that priority in the shared space area is negotiated, primarily through eye contact. This obviously puts blind people at a severe disadvantage, but the lack of delineation can make the street more difficult to understand for people with learning difficulties, and the disabled are not the only people affected. A shared surface environment is likely to be much more frightening for elderly people. Small children are told to stop at the kerb’s edge and to look and listen before crossing the road. How can they do that if there is no kerb?

This whole idea is self-evidently barmy. We are indebted to the noble Lord for documenting this in detail. People’s experiences of shared space schemes are overwhelmingly negative: 63% of those who have used shared surface schemes rated their experience as poor, and, as the noble Lord, Lord Holmes, told us, more than one-third of people actively avoid them altogether. This pattern of response was reflected across most choices of travel, with 66% of drivers, 64% of pedestrians and nearly half of cyclists—48%—reporting their experience as poor. Yet overzealous councils continue risking public safety with fashionable simplified street design.

In January 2013, a partially sighted pensioner was killed in Coventry after being hit by a bus on a shared space scheme in an area that previously had a pedestrian-controlled crossing. The court ruled that the bus driver was not responsible for the death after hearing a statement that the shared surface was so confusing as to make an accident inevitable. Yet the noble Lord’s report tells us that there is significant underreporting of accidents in shared spaces areas.

People constantly referred to finding schemes frightening, intimidating and dangerous and to never feeling safe. People commented on poor visibility when trying to cross roads, often due to parked cars and to vehicles not stopping to allow them to cross. One respondent summed up the shared space they used as,

“lethally dangerous. In poor light or glare or shadow, drivers cannot see pedestrians. Disabled people and those with poor sight or mobility cannot protect themselves. The idea behind such spaces depends on every user being 100 per cent able and 100 per cent alert at all times, which just doesn't happen in real life. I consider this whole idea to be completely (and criminally) insane”.

One blind user unable to access a local shared space independently said that,

“for people with no sight like myself they are a death trap. I cannot express how terrible they are and how they make me feel so angry; to think all the people responsible for them expect us to use it when we cannot see. I use the one in Leek with my husband and never on my own”.

In promoting these schemes, local authorities are not meeting the public sector equality duty. Under the public sector equality duty, public bodies must have due regard to advancing equality through removing or minimising disadvantages suffered by people due to their protected characteristics, taking steps to meet the needs of people from protected groups where these are different from the needs of other people and encouraging people from protected groups to participate in public life or in other activities where their participation is disproportionately low. By authorising shared space schemes, local authorities are not removing or minimising disadvantages suffered by disabled people but are doing the exact opposite. By failing to install kerbs or adequate alternative tactile delineation and controlled crossings, they are not taking steps to meet the needs of people with sight loss, which are different from the needs of other people.

The noble Lord, Lord Holmes, calls for a moratorium until proper impact assessments have been carried out. Guide Dogs also calls for a moratorium pending the production of proper statutory guidance. I see the noble Baroness, Lady Kramer, as a friend and commend her on the work she did while at the department, but I fear I remain a subscriber to the Armageddon scenario. We know enough about shared space schemes to know about the harm that they cause and the lack of evidence that they do any good. I spoke to someone the other day who told me he had been talking to a planner, who told him that the main value of shared space schemes was aesthetic. I do not think we need a moratorium; I think they should be banned.