“What are you doing to your high street? Where are staff and customers supposed to park during the day or people doing pick-ups and drop-offs?”
Kat Georgiou, Green Lanes Business Association, quoted by Enfield Dispatch
The Arnos Grove consultation
Map showing approximate area included in the August 2024 Arnos Grove CPZ proposals. Purple shading denotes streets in both the current and the proposed revised scheme. Blue denotes streets in the proposed revised zone that are not in the current CPZ. The Minchenden Estate (the shaded area to the north-east of Arnos Park was a "supplementary element" included in the consultation in order to gauge resident opinion (This map has no official status.)
There is no news yet regarding the council's current thinking about a second CPZ proposal that was put out to consultation on the same date as the now abandoned Palmers Green scheme. The core proposal was to extend the hours of operation and extent of the existing Arnos Grove CPZ, something necessitated by the construction of flats on former car parks at the tube station, a project being run by Transport for London as a deliberately low-car development. However, the same consultation also floated the idea of a "supplementary element" extending the CPZ north-east of Arnos Park through the Minchenden Estate as far as Southgate Green:
"The consultation seeks to establish what interest exists amongst residents of the extension area marked 'NE' for zonal parking on their streets. This element is deemed supplementary."
Excerpt from Arnos Grove CPZ consultation, August 2024
This proposed CPZ too has aroused strong opposition, from a group calling themselves Say No! to the CPZ, one of whose leaders is former Enfield cabinet member Daniel Anderson. In September a barrister belonging to the group wrote to the council's chief executive setting out arguments why it would be unlawful for the council to proceed with the proposals and threatening to instigate legal action "forthwith" if it did, stating that "The group is organised and determined to defeat your proposed unlawful acts".
The legal letter sent in September refers to Say No! as "a residents' group opposing the proposed widening and extension of CPZs within Arnos Grove and Palmers Green". However, a post on the group's website dated 17th December suggests that at that later date the focus of Say No! was still opposition to the Arnos Grove CPZ proposals, though they had "been in contact with the Palmers Green Business Association" (sic - presumably a reference to the GLBA) and "discussions [were] ongoing about the possibility of the two groups joining forces to strengthen our collective response to Enfield Council".