Michael Liebreich Jon, let's talk about Hackney. How did you end up in Hackney?
Jon Burke So, my undergraduate degree is in civil engineering. I ended up getting a job as a Parliamentary Assistant in the City of London Corporation, and then shortly afterwards, I moved to City Hall, where I worked for the London Assembly Labour group for about eight years in various different roles. And then in 2014, I was first elected to the London Borough of Hackney's Council. I eventually became Cabinet Member for Energy, Waste, Transport and Public Realm. So, I was kind of the de facto cabinet member for environment, and in that role, I delivered the largest number of low-traffic neighbourhoods and schools streets in the UK; the largest free drinking water fountain programme in the UK; the largest urban forestry programme in the UK; fortnightly waste collections eliminating 6000 tonnes of black bag waste from incineration annually; and really seized the opportunity to deliver those changes that were within our power as a local authority. I think it'd be fair to say there are a plurality of opinions, particularly around my interventions on surface transport emissions. But I think that's always going to be the case when you're seeking to retard and reverse a car normative status quo.
ML The work that you did in Hackney to me seems pretty obviously transformational and good. You didn't mention much about street trees. How many trees did you plant?
JB Over a period of about two years, I secured funding for and designed a programme of 5000 new street trees - 30,000 saplings in our green spaces and 1000 mature park trees. Bear in mind, Hackney is the sixth smallest local authority area in the UK, so that’s a very significant intervention. Trees are the most advanced, precision-engineered technology we have to address, through shading and evapotranspiration, the intensity, frequency and duration of extreme heat events in our cities. It’s somewhere within the ballpark to say that a medium-sized street tree produces the same atmospheric cooling effect as 10 room-sized air conditioning units operating 24 hours a day. The process of cooling water vapour from trees and the way in which it extracts energy to do that and cools the air... I mean, it's just remarkable.
ML A tree is really a heat pump. It's a machine for moving energy out of cities. It's an amazing thing. Let’s get back to your championing low-traffic neighbourhoods. That culminated in Hackney with you getting death threats?
JB I think that knowing that you came into politics to do good and then to be compared to Pol Pot and various other genocidal maniacs because you've implemented a series of low-traffic neighbourhoods… I'm very up for making the case for my values and fighting for them and delivering them. Some of my Hackney Council colleagues thought it was all a bit much, essentially, and they thought, can't we go a bit a little bit slower. But you know, these are the same people who stood up in a council chamber and declared a climate emergency. And I'd often get people coming to me, and they'd say, I went to Amsterdam for my holidays, and it was fantastic, and can't we just do what they did there? I was like, well have a look at the footage of De Pijp back in the 70s, where you've got grown men driving at kids, fistfights in the streets. Very little human progress has been achieved without some degree of pushback from those who benefit from the status quo. And the status quo around cars, how it's arisen is really remarkable. The number of registered motor vehicles on the UK road has doubled in 30 years. It's just absolutely enormous the effects of that.
ML Is there anything legitimate that you see in their pushback? What opponents will say is that you're just making movement harder, not making the area more attractive.
JB I will not be taking lessons on local economic development from people who drive to get their shopping from an out-of-town shopping center in a pickup truck. The reality is that you don't create communities in which there's a high degree of footfall, there's a low level of road injuries, there's a high level of neighbouring, by creating the conditions that actively encourage people to drive 500 meters to the shops. 50% of all motor vehicle journeys in the UK are for leisure or shopping. 40% are under two miles. They're mostly being taken by people who could otherwise undertake in different modes of transport. As policymakers, we have to create the circumstances in which we try to reflect that utilitarian principle of the greatest happiness of the greatest number. Before I delivered the LTNs, 40 odd percent of motor vehicles that were traveling through the borough were traveling through from one end to the other without stopping - we were deriving no social benefit from that. But we know from the literature that LTNs halve motor vehicle injuries. We know they improve air quality, not just within the LTN, but on boundary roads. They've now found that there are substantial reductions in street crime, particularly of a violent and sexual nature, within LTN areas. Because cars have become a kind of hieroglyph for freedom in the minds of some people, I think their reactions to things like low traffic neighbourhoods are more based in the idea that they affront their conception of what freedom is, than that they actually limit their ability to use a motor vehicle.
ML Let's take an example that I think you probably know about, Chiswick High Street. There's no question, it would make a magnificent low-traffic neighbourhood. But it is also an important through route, east-west into and out of London.
JB The iron law of local government is to serve the interests of people who elected you, not the people who drive through your community. Why would you, as a local policymaker, go to your electorate, after four years, and say, actually, I had an opportunity to reduce the chance of your child being killed on the way to school in the morning, Mrs. Jones, and to improve local air quality, and to increase footfall in your local neighborhood shops, but I chose not to do it, because my priority, frankly, was someone living in Surrey. In answer to your broader question - the right to life is inviolable, right? And I would say that the right to clean air is an extension of the right to life. So, it's more of a first order consideration than the right to shave five minutes off your vehicle journey. Our residential streets were not built to be a pressure relief valve for an overloaded main road network. I hope, in my own small way that, I've inspired other councilors to take a kind of maximalist approach to what you can achieve when you're a cabinet member in local government in the UK, despite your lack of powers and often funding.