Johnny Thalassites: In Kensington and Chelsea, we collect rubbish twice a week. What a contrast with Birmingham.

Cllr Johnny Thalassites is the Lead Member for Finance, Customer Services, and Net Zero on Kensington and Chelsea Council

In Labour-run Birmingham, rubbish piles high. In Labour-run London boroughs, once per fortnight waste collections are fast becoming the unhappy norm. It isn’t good enough, especially given any councillor can tell you that residents want clean streets and clean air.

But there’s another way. Vote Conservative – like the good people of Kensington and Chelsea – and you can elect a council that has increased street cleaning budgets by £750,000 in 2025 – and still collects rubbish twice per week (the only London borough that collects twice weekly across its constituency).

Since 2018, our Conservative council has cut carbon emissions faster than just about any London borough. Just in the past few weeks, we have cut emissions from our waste fleet by 90 per cent by using hydro vegetable oil to power vehicles, instead of petrol or diesel, without costing taxpayers any more money. We are pressing on with retrofitting local schools and operational buildings, as well as enhancing our green spaces and targeted pedestrianisation of streets (such as the world-famous Portobello Road and Pavilion Road).

But we aren’t complacent about our work – and we still want to bring emissions down further, including those from transport, by giving residents more choice about how they get around, and by giving visitors more choice about how they commute to and from work or visit our iconic shopping streets.

Some of our pedestrianisation work has helped, with more people than ever visiting Portobello by foot or public transport and eating in our al fresco terraces in places like Chelsea Green and Bute Street. So, too, having more bike hangars and cycle training helps encourage people to consider alternative ways to travel. I still hop on ‘Boris bikes’ sometimes between meetings!

Nevertheless, many residents need cars to go about their lives, be it to get to work, appointments, or to ferry family to and from school. Sure, nudges can help – but we must also be pragmatic.

That is why Kensington and Chelsea introduced the first per gram of CO2 charging system for parking permits in the country, meaning if you drive a cleaner vehicle, you pay less and if you drive a more polluting vehicle, you pay a little more. This is the kind of incentive that can work to get people thinking about the choices they make, without forcing people to do things that make their lives more difficult. In addition, we set a target to get every household within 200m of a charge point. We have just about managed this and are more or less there on a 100m radius now, as well. This isn’t perfect, this isn’t a panacea, but it does make it easier to think about making a different choice, cutting ‘range anxiety’ – one of the biggest barriers to EV take-up.

We also know that if new infrastructure is visually unappealing, then residents are less likely to support it. Don’t let the ugly be the enemy of the good, I say. So, we partnered with OVO and Ubitricity in 2017 to build charging infrastructure at low cost – visually and economically – retrofitting existing lamp columns and bollards. This gives residents an attractive choice to charge their EVs, keeping up the high standard of the street scene in one of Britain’s best loved boroughs.

Not content to stop there, we are trying to get out ahead of consumer choices, since we know the market is likely to cut prices as tech gets better and competition grows. We are already seeing a rising number of EV permit registrations, even though the number of total resident permits is falling, and we have to be ready for more of the same. More chargers will form part of that answer – but we will look, in particular, at how we can introduce more rapid chargers. If you want to refuel a ‘regular car’, you can go to the station and do that in a couple of minutes. Whilst many local people will be able to recharge their EVs overnight, some will need to do so more quickly. There will have to be provision for that kind of rapid service demand.

There’s a real energy in the Council when it comes to driving down emissions and making it easier for residents to get on with their lives. We want to be there for those who need us, and to get out of the way of those who don’t. When I joined the Council in 2018, there were many fewer chargers and many fewer electric vehicles on the streets. The changes we have introduced are going with the grain of a growing share of consumer choices and making it easier for people to get around the borough and the city the way they want; true to  Conservative principles.

If you visit Kensington and Chelsea, then do visit some of our newly pedestrianised areas – and if you’re a driver, then consider using an EV to get around.