London: Policy into Practice
From 2013 to 2019 Lucy Saunders held a unique role spanning the public health and transport sectors working for Transport for London, Greater London Authority and Public Health England to embed health into transport policy and practice. This position enabled her to implement her Healthy Streets Approach.
In 2014 Transport for London won multiple awards for publishing the world’s first transport health action plan ‘Improving the health of Londoners’. Lucy wrote this plan, setting out how taking her Healthy Streets Approach would deliver health benefits in the round.
On his election in 2016, Mayor of London Sadiq Khan affirmed Healthy Streets would be a leading principle under his leadership. This was swiftly followed by all his statutory strategies setting out their role in delivering this cross-sector Healthy Streets Approach. Vitally, Healthy Streets was the framework for the 25 year Transport Strategy and a key policy of the city’s spatial plan, The London Plan.
Over the following years Lucy worked with the Greater London Authority and Transport for London to translate Healthy Streets policy into practice. She trained hundreds of staff to enable them to adopt this new ‘people-first’ approach to their work. She worked collaboratively with teams to develop tools to align their work with Healthy Streets including checking street designs and assessing planning applications. She established a new city-wide monitoring system for tracking performance. Everyday physical activity and mode shift were included as a key performance indicators and a surveillance system of 1500 locations was established to review annually with an adaption of the mystery shopper methodology.
Lucy continues to support the implementation of the Healthy Streets Approach in London. This includes mentoring and training the team of Healthy Streets Officers who coordinate behaviour change and infrastructure projects with the London boroughs and the City of London. These officers, hosted by Sustrans, ensure that the Healthy Streets Approach is applied through prioritisation, communications, coordination and evaluation of borough-based programmes.
Lucy is also working on a unique programme to incorporate Healthy Streets ‘micro-improvements’ into the asset management programme at Transport for London. Maintenance teams managing the day to day condition and functioning of streets have huge scope to deliver better streets at pace and scale through making minor, often cost-neutral, improvements. These include replacing bollards with cycle stands, planters or seating, removing or moving signage and fixing the missing links in step-free, level footways.
More Case Studies
