LIVERPOOL GREEN PARTY

Last updated: March 2010

Introduction

Liverpool is a great city and it deserves the best leadership. Green Party policies can make our city cleaner, greener and more pleasant to live in, for everybody. More elected Green councillors will mean more influence to take the city in a better direction for the future.

Liverpool Green Party is committed to:

• People – fairness, shared health and wealth
• Economic sense – investing locally, distributing wealth fairly, using resources wisely.
• Integrity – honest, open politics and a new way of making things happen
• Environment – from local streets to global climate – we want it to be able to sustain us and our children.

Traffic and transport

In spite of what people think, the Green party is not out to ban cars. A private car can be a useful and necessary means of transport. However, we have to recognize that private cars are a heavy burden on our society. And we all pay the price, whether we use a car ourselves, or not. They are a major factor in pollution. They dictate how we navigate through our city, and even what our city looks like.
So, even though we accept the necessity of private cars, we don’t believe they deserve the privileged status they enjoy in our society. If people use a car only if and when they need it, our city would be more pleasant.
We envisage a city where walking and cycling are the preferred choices for short trips. Less traffic and more people on the streets make it safe for children to walk and cycle to school together. More walking and cycling will make neighbourhoods more lively and feel safer for everyone to live in and move about in. People with mobility difficulties must be able to use all forms of public transport with ease and our streets, pavements and public spaces must be accessible and easy for everyone to enjoy.
In order to achieve that we would:

• Introduce a maximum speed of 20 mph in all of the city, with the sole exception of arterial roads: 20’s Plenty (see website). Research shows that road casualties are reduced by as much as 40% in areas where the 20mile speed limit has been introduced.
• Bring a Car Club back into the city. Car Clubs are the ideal solution if you need a car occasionally, but don’t want the hassle that comes with owning one: maintenance, insurance, taxes, finding parking space…. In order to do so we need to create incentives for car clubs: free exclusive parking bases at strategic points in the city. Local planning policy should require any sizeable housing development to include a car club base with subsidised membership for residents.
• Public transport: Buses should be given more priority in the city centre, as well as more bus lanes to speed up journeys.
• Make the case for reopening Sefton Park railway station on Smithdown Road.
• Facilities such as leisure centres currently provide free car parking but no help with the cripplingly high cost of bus fares. The City Council should negotiate combined travel/entry tickets to cut the cost for families without a car.
• Improve cycling routes and facilities in the city: Surveys among cyclists have shown that many cyclists find cycling through the city centre scary, because of the heavy traffic they have to negotiate. More cycle lanes would make cycling through the city safer. Cycle parking space in the city, particularly by train and bus stations should be enlarged.
• We also need to improve the relationship between motorists and cyclists. Cyclists are still too often seen as obstructing traffic by some motorists. They ARE traffic. So we want a campaign to improve the relationship between motorists and cyclists.
• Support the Merseyside Cycling Campaign
• Encourage cycling and walking to work. Improve cycle parking in the city and in the workplace, and create financial incentives for leaving the car at home.
• Make the city more friendly for pedestrians and for people with mobility issues: make sure people with mobility aids, wheelchairs or buggies can move around freely and safely. Triple the budget for dropped kerbs.

Housing and energy

The Housing Market Renewal strategy has led to large sections of the city being ripped apart, and communities broken up. Streets of terraced houses are seen as ‘obsolete’, left empty and boarded up, and eventually demolished. But in many cases these houses and streets can be refurbished, the houses made energy efficient, and the communities kept together. The actual cost, in money, pollution, and waste of materials for demolition and rebuilding is significantly higher than for refurbishing.

We propose:

• Preference for refurbishing of perfectly good terrace houses over demolishing and rebuild. Refurbishing will keep streets intact and communities together. Refurbishing existing buildings requires less material and creates less waste than demolishing and new build, but it generally requires more skilled labour. A chance to boost local jobs and skills. It will be an opportunity to launch a green apprentice scheme to train for the new green economy
• Create and implement more environmentally ambitious local planning policies: Push for implementation of the Merton Rule in Liverpool. The Merton rule is a planning policy, now adopted by a number of cities and counties (but not yet by Liverpool) that requires all new development larger than 1,000 square meters to generate at least 10% of its energy use from on-site renewable energy equipment. This policy has now been adopted by London and other cities and is part of the government’s central planning guidance. For more information on the Merton Rule: Visit their wiki page or their wensite.
• Implement city wide home energy efficiency schemes reducing fuel poverty and reducing carbon emissions.

Communities

The main aim and purpose of the city council is to serve the community. It must do so by respecting and listening to people, and by working together with the community, building trust. The interests of the community must be the interests of the council. Solutions to problems must be community-based
Liverpool’s history as an international port has given it a long tradition of diversity. Different communities live close together. This diversity should be celebrated and made into an asset for the city by giving everyone a voice.
Liverpool is also a city that boasts three universities. We want to improve the interaction between the city’s communities and the universities, by encouraging life-long learning, communal projects and lectures.

• Provide local police officers with bicycles for patrolling. Police in St. Michaels have been given mountain bikes for patrolling thanks to the Green Party councillors. We want to extend this to every ward in the city.
• The workers who clean our streets try to do a good job, but often find themselves pulled this way and that by political pressure. We find that there is no correspondence between the official schedules and the actual street sweeping on the ground. The appointment of a monopoly outside contractor, owned by Enterprise plc, has made accountability less clear. We will extend the role of citizen observers to report these discrepancies and put pressure on Enterprise to fulfil its commitments.

Business

Mega shopping malls and supermarkets now control a large chunk of our local economy. The highly competitive prices that large chains can offer customers (although they are often less competitive than they pretend) may be tempting, but over time they are destructive for our local communities: local suppliers and local shops are forced out of business, the local economy will suffer, and the only winners are the mega chains themselves. We would:

• Discourage more mega supermarkets and shopping centres in and around the city. Free parking for big supermarkets gives them an unfair advantage over local shops. Local planning policy should require supermarkets to provide dedicated disabled parking but beyond that, any free parking should be available to non-customers as well.
• Encourage small independent retailers through development planning.. because local shops support more jobs than superstores.
• Private Finance Initiative has long been exposed as an expensive way for governments to keep development costs off the books. It has been described as ‘paying your mortgage with your credit card’. Even if government funding ‘subsidizes’ a PFI funded project, we will all pay for it in the end through our taxes. So if there is the possibility of funding a project through public borrowing, that is almost always the cheaper option by far. We will therefore resist the use of PFI financing in cases where public funding is an option.

Public Services

The Green party wants to bring nature into the city. Trees in the streets, allotments and green space have a positive influence on people’s wellbeing. They also have a great capacity for absorbing the pollution and the noise of the city and supporting wildlife such as birds and insects.
Liverpool is blessed with a large number of parks. Some of these are beautiful and well kept, but others have been neglected. We want to protect and improve our parks.

• Convert the patches of derelict and degraded land in the city into allotments or into green space.
• Plant more trees and protect existing trees in streets and parks.
• Bring Newsham park back to its Victorian glory
• Redesign the perimeter road around Sefton park to discourage through traffic, and reconnect the park with the community
• Support a not-for-profit local organisation to support local food production providing affordable, low carbon fruit and vegetables for communities

Litter and waste

We all produce hundreds of kilos of waste every year. The disposal of this waste is already a major problem nationwide, and this will only get worse, because landfill sites are filling up, and we are running out of places for new ones. In 2008/2009 less than 27% of Liverpool waste was recycled, the rest went to landfill. Reducing, separating and recycling are the only options open to us.
It also makes economic sense: sending waste to landfill sites will soon be more expensive than recycling, while reducing saves money: at present the average household in Britain throws away over £400 worth of food every year.

• Create incentives for businesses and households to reduce, separate and recycle waste.
• Create and support jobs in the recycling market: promote and support initiatives to recycle and reduce, such as bicycle recycle shops and nappy services.

Government

Government, the people that rule us and make decisions for us, have never had such a bad name as they have now. That goes for the national government, but it also reflects on local government.
In order to restore the trust in government a series of measures, increasing transparency and at the same time reducing the cost of government, are proposed by Liverpool Green Party.

• Reduce privileges for councillors such as free parking and rent-free party offices
• All contracts the council signs should be open and published on the council website
• All contracts required to support local economy and to protect health and wellbeing of citizens and our environment
• We will publish details of all councillors’ expense claims in the same way as MPs’ expenses are being published. The Green Party had to use Freedom of Information law to extract expenses information after other councillors voted against automatic publication.
• We will look for opportunities to reduce the number of councillors from 90 to about 60 and to introduce proportional representation. We believe we should elect the whole council once every four years instead of having an election of just one third of the chamber nearly every year. This would reduce the cost of local government and allow councillors to focus on serving the people rather than permanent electioneering

Did you know?

• Green political parties exist all over the world representing people at local, national and international levels – Councillor, MP and MEP.
• The Green Party is growing! We have 126 councillors elected on 43 councils across England and Wales from Liverpool to Leicester, London to Lancashire, Sheffield to Leeds, Brighton to Norwich.