This is your first big test, Boris – so don’t blow it

"The rapidity of the deterioration in [traffic] conditions inside the western extension has been striking ... the western extension is currently experiencing no material congestion relief ... the frequency of residents' travel by car was largely unchanged ... key indicators of bus speeds and reliability do not show any material improvement ... no clear scheme impact [on air quality] from either the original central or the western extension zones can be ­discerned."

Those blunt verdicts — published just six weeks ago — come not from some crazed Right-wing petrolhead, knocking over his daily quota of pensioners en route to a job as an arms dealer, but from Transport for London.

To be fair, the extension has reduced the absolute volume of traffic in the area — though the reduction, in TfL's words, is "lower than anticipated". But extra traffic has been created outside the extension zone, cancelling out nearly half of even this lower-than-anticipated fall.
The extension's main beneficiaries turn out to be the wealthier inhabitants of Kensington and Chelsea, who no longer have to fight for parking spaces and can drive at will throughout central London on their resident's discount.

The main victims, as the TfL research also confirms, have been rather less plush small businesspeople and market traders, already shutting up shop in droves, and thus the area itself. Shopkeepers' and restaurateurs' anger, when I went to talk to them this week, was considerable. And their plight is about to get far worse.

Until now, the western extension was the only new problem they had to deal with. Now, however, there is likely to be a recession — and Westfield, London's largest shopping mall, is opening, C-charge free, a mile down the road.
Small retailers are a cornerstone of what makes Notting Hill and Kensington loved and visited not just by their own people but also by much of London and by the world. These are precious neighbourhoods, in both senses of the word. They now face a triple whammy which could, quite simply, wipe them out in their current form.
I thought about all this yesterday as I watched David Cameron add a new item to his list of "brokens". As well as a "broken society", we now, it seems, have a "broken politics". I don't think British society is broken — to anyone who's ever seen Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq, the claim is absurd — but I do think British politics is. And the western extension is an excellent, if minor, example.

It shows how policymakers ignore the wishes of the public: 71 per cent of residents and 80 per cent of businesses were opposed to the extension but the previous Mayor did it anyway.

It shows how political decisions are often based on emotion rather than fact. Because cars are "bad", any measure against them must perforce be "good". With the original central C-charge zone, good was indeed done. It took five years for congestion to return to what it was before the charge.

But in the western zone, after just six months, congestion was already greater than before it started. As lots of people warned at the time, the two areas — one largely commercial, the other largely residential — are quite different. The western extension is not entirely without benefits but they are minor, and have come at a high price.

The extension illuminates the often outrageously mistaken priorities of those set above us. Not content with lifting big money from small traders, TfL has actually paid £30 million to build new transport links to the very same Westfield megamall which threatens to put them out of business. Of course the centre needs to be served by public transport, but the taxpayer should not be subsidising it.

It's an example, too, of the role of official deceit in the political process. There's a consultation running now on whether to scrap the western extension — but TfL's official leaflet to residents omits every one of its own findings I quoted at the beginning of this piece and often, indeed, blatantly claims that the reverse is true. I'm not sure I'd buy any consultation result obtained on the basis of this dodgy dossier.

And the western extension shows how unelected officials exercise too much sway over elected politicians. Having campaigned, at least in the early stages of the election, to scrap the extension, Boris has said some things since that show him backing away from this view. City Hall sources admit that he was influenced by a TfL claim that there would be a £70 million net drop in revenue for London if he did so.

As the Standard demonstrated yesterday, that claim is a gross exaggeration. But bureaucrats so often cling to failed policies after their justification has been blown. The bonkers plan to hold the Olympic horse events in Greenwich Park is another one.

City Hall denies that Boris has made up his mind and hints that he may, indeed, end up scrapping the extension. I hope he does, and not just for its own sake. One of the key issues of the new mayoralty is how far Boris can exert his will over the Ken-created GLA machine, with its instinctive reflexes of spending, of regulation and of hostility towards people such as Notting Hill shopkeepers. At the TfL board meeting on Tuesday, you could already hear the impatience of Tories like Steve Norris with the slow pace of change.

Even if Boris passes the test over the extension, it may be too late. Grinding through various statutory processes to end the charge will take at least a year. There might not be many small shops left by then. He should consider emergency interim measures — for instance, announcing that while the extension will remain until formally scrapped, it will no longer be enforced.

But conversely, if Boris does end up keeping this dog of a policy, after clearly promising to "get rid of it", that really would be the "broken politics" his leader yesterday condemned.