A London council’s unsuccessful legal fight to remove low-traffic neighbourhoods is set to cost taxpayers more than £278,000.
Tower Hamlets has already spent £124,332.50 on challenges against the LTNs in Bethnal Green in the High Court and Court of Appeal.
The council says it could spend up to £153,745 more on continuing the fight in the Supreme Court.
The ‘Save Our Safer Streets’ campaign, which wants to keep the low-traffic neighbourhoods (LTNs), accused the council of “fighting to the UK’s highest court for the right to waste millions of pounds on a harmful unpopular decision”.
But the Aspire Party, currently in control of the council, said it had been forced into the legal fight by the campaign’s “decision to drag this through the courts”.
The Local Democracy Reporting Service (LDRS) obtained the figures through a Freedom of Information (FOI) Act request to the council.
It comes as the council is applying to the Supreme Court for the right to appeal against a decision that its decision to remove the LTNs was unlawful.
The figures show the council estimates it could spend between £5,390 and £27,390 on this application.
If its application is successful, the council estimates it could spend between £114,355 and £126,355 more in the subsequent court case.
That means total costs across all three cases could come to £278,077.50.
Ted Maxwell of Save Our Safer Streets told the LDRS: “For Tower Hamlets Council to spend up to a potential £153,000 on pushing the case to the Supreme Court seems very wasteful, when public funds are urgently needed in the borough.”
He also said that, if the council were to remove the LTNs, it would cost £2.5million to remove planters, benches and cycle lanes. That was the figure given in a council cabinet report on the decision in 2023.
Maxwell, who is standing to become an independent councillor for Bethnal Green West at the local election on Thursday, May 7, said: “We are amazed that they are fighting to the UK’s highest court for the right to waste millions of pounds on a harmful unpopular decision.”
He also said the decision to launch legal action had been a “last resort for us, after all our attempts to engage constructively with the council failed”.
However, an Aspire spokesperson said the decision to remove the LTNs had the support of residents.
They said they had been given a “democratic mandate” to remove them after promising to do so in their 2022 election campaign. The spokesperson said the council had been forced to defend this by the campaign’s legal action.
They said: “It’s a bit rich for Save Our Safer Streets [SOSS] to complain about the cost to the council of the lawsuit they themselves brought against the council.
“SOSS’s decision to drag this through the courts has forced the council to defend the clear wishes of local residents to remove a handful of unpopular, counter-productive LTNs that caused severe congestion and worsened air pollution on main roads, disproportionately harming predominantly working-class and ethnic minority households on those streets.”
A public consultation by the council in 2023 found around 41% of local respondents were in favour of removing the LTN on Old Bethnal Green Road and 42% in favour of removing LTNs in Columbia Road and Arnold Circus.
In contrast, 59% wanted to keep the Old Bethnal Green LTN, and 58% wanted to keep the ones in Arnold Circus and Columbia Road.
The borough’s previous Labour administration introduced the three LTNs between 2020 and 2022.
But current mayor Lutfur Rahman, of Aspire, was elected in 2022 with a promise to scrap them – a decision he formally approved the following year.
Save Our Safer Streets challenged the decision in the High Court, but lost in December 2024. However, the Court of Appeal subsequently ruled in its favour in January this year.
The council has now applied for permission to appeal this decision in the Supreme Court.
It was unable to provide comment to the LDRS because of rules governing council communications in pre-election periods.
In a statement following the Court of Appeal judgement in January it said it was “disappointed with the ruling, not least because previously the courts have ruled in our favour”.
Save Our Safer Streets says it has spent “just over £100,000” on its legal costs, funded by donations from 1,300 people. It anticipates spending a further £15,000 if the case reaches the Supreme Court.
