The Accessibility Appraisal Consultation Paper is part of Stockport Council’s Core Strategy – how the borough needs to develop over the next 15-20 years.  The document is being consulted on and you have until 25th November to give your opinions.

This is my summary of that paper.  Since the full document is 82 pages, you can take it as read that things are missed out.  Also, this is purely from me reading the document – which you can do too.  I’ve no extra information and I may have made mistakes.  With that in mind, let’s press on.

What’s the purpose of the Accessibility Appraisal? 

We should start off by being clear about what the document is and isn’t trying to achieve.  It doesn’t lay out proposals for what should be done in Stockport.  You won’t find plans to improve a certain bus service, build new housing in a certain area or create a new retail park.

Rather, it attempts to set the scene, to provide the basis for making those proposals, to define the problems that we need to solve and the challenges we need to meet.  Not quite as exciting, but very important.  If you’re not asking the right questions, your chance of coming up with the right answers is pretty low.

What is accessibility?

For this study, “accessibility” is simply how easy it is for people to get to everywhere they need to: their jobs, shops, schools, medical centres, hospitals, pubs, restaurants, leisure facilities, parks and community facilities.

You may reach them by car; but not everyone has a car and, even for those who do, it’s not much good saying the shop’s just down the road if you have to sit in a traffic jam for an hour to get there.  You might also get to them by train, bus, bike or on foot.

The Government is asking for over 7,500 new dwellings to be built in Stockport over the next 17 years, meaning more people and more traffic.

A big part of our challenge is to figure out how to organise that so we get the extra flats and houses in the right places and keep (and improve) this accessibility, for both new and existing residents.

Dealing with inequality

Stockport has relatively high inequality, both between areas in the borough (e.g. compare Brinnington and Bramhall) and within areas (e.g. older people).  It’s very important we provide access for all, not just the wealthier in our community.  We also need to recognise that more deprived areas have different problems, such as poorer health and higher unemployment.

Two examples

Let’s suppose we look at a relatively poor area, and we think it might be a good place to build additional low cost housing too.  So we can predict we’ll have a population who not only need all the usual services and facilities like shops and parks, but will have a higher need for healthcare and certain sorts of jobs.  Additionally, they are less likely to have cars.

For an area like this, it will be very important to ensure safe and reasonably fast access to healthcare, shops, workplaces, entertainment and the rest of it by public transport, walking and cycling.

Alternatively, we can look at a wealthier area with high car ownership.  In this case, it might be more important to look at congestion, to predict where new pinch points in the  road network will emerge and tackle those (for example, through the SEMMMS strategy).

 So what are the problems?

The paper is the result of a big study that looked across the borough, worked out how good access was to all the different services in each place and mapped it.  That was also compared to areas of low car ownership and poor health.

Overall, the picture is clear.  Those of us in the centre, north and north west of the borough have – by and large – the best access to all the different services.  That’s areas like the Town Centre, Cheadle, Gatley, the Heatons, Reddish, Cheadle Hulme and out to Hazel Grove.

Those in the south and east of the borough have the poorest access to services: Bramhall (outside the village centre), Woodford, Romiley, Marple, Bredbury and Offerton, for example.

That’s not necessarily a problem right now: plenty of people choose to live somewhere more rural and happily trade-off being a bit further from the shops against living in their preferred location.

It is a problem, however, where you have a population with poor health and low car ownership who also have poor access to services; or where the roads are getting so congested that drivers can’t get to where they want to go.

So, for example, the study identifies a lack of links from Marple to Stockport Town Centre and congestion around Bramhall Moor as serious issues.  It also expresses concern about the lack of access to services in places like Bredbury Green, Cherry Tree Lane (Romiley) and Marple South (especially Hawk Green).

And to absolutely no-one’s surprise, the study idenfies congestion issues on most of the main roads around the borough.

What’s to be done?

As I said before, this report is about identifying the questions, with the answers still to come, and that’s an important thing to get right.  However, we do get a sniff of what some of the answers might look like.

The study suggests better promoting the Town Centre as  an evening destination.  That means not only having the restaurants, pubs, clubs, cinemas, theatres and the like, but also public transport links that run late into the night.

It also talks about promoting mixed developments (where you have housing, workplaces and other services all in the same area) and more “employment sites” around the borough.  The aim is to reduce the distances people need to travel, which would reduce congestion, not to mention making our lives more pleasant.

For example, the report idenfies Cheadle Royal and Woodford as two such centres, but warns that public transport access to both are currently poor and would need to be improved.

What’s there to consult on?

So far I’ve tried to summarise the content of the report.  This is a consultation and the paper says

Comments are invited on the proposed approach. By way of guidance comments would be welcome in relation to the following questions:
1. Do you agree with the principles behind the approach?
2. Do you think the process is sufficiently transparent to use as a basis for accessibility policies?
3. Do you agree with the emphasis of the approach on public choice rather than just achieving a minimum accessibility standard?
4. Would you like to see this approach applied in support other areas of policy development (such as in education or health service provision)?

What might you say?  You might think the report is about right – if so, it’s worth saying it.  If nothing else, it’ll give the people who wrote it a bit more job satisfaction!

Do you agree that accessibility is the right thing to focus on?  As we look forwards over the next two decades, should we be spending time, money and energy on minimising the travel time for people to get to where they want to go; or is that the wrong goal?

You might feel that it hasn’t got the measures right when looking at accessibility.  As the report admits, it doesn’t identify pinch points in the transport network, nor does it take into account off-road transport routes such as footpaths and cycle paths.

Perhaps you disagree with the idea of trying to bring our jobs closer to our homes and feel that a better solution would be to build a transport network to shuttle people as quickly as possible to Manchester, Liverpool, Sheffield, Leeds and elsewhere to give Stockport residents the widest catchment area for jobs.

Question 3 links into ideas of what the Local Authority – and its partners – are there for.  Is it the job of the public sector to make our transport network as good as it can be, or should we be doing much less (and so needing less money to do it, perhaps resulting in lower Council Tax).

Until 25th November, you can visit the Council’s consultation portal, read the documents, register online and submit comments.  You can also submit your comments by email to planning.policy@stockport.gov.uk.

Disclaimer

In this post I’ve attempted to summarise Stockport Council’s Accessibility Appraisal Consultation Paper. This is my own work; it is not an official Council or Liberal Democrat summary and I’d be frankly amazed if there weren’t significant omissions and mistakes. Nothing in this summary should be taken as indicating either my or the Liberal Democrats’ support for, or agreement with, the strategy paper.

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