• THE consultation on the development for Chapel Market has closed.

The current plans are to make the market “more attractive, cleaner, safer and easier to walk, cycle or wheel buggies and wheelchairs around”.

Laudable aims, which I am sure will receive support. There are, though, two fundamental flaws with this consultation.

First, the likely support for such desirable, generalised, outcomes should not be used by Islington Council to justify whatever detailed plans it might implement. We all want world peace, but we might differ greatly in how we think that ought to be achieved.

Secondly, and more seriously, the consultation clearly will have no, or minimal, influence on whatever the council already has in mind and so the process is a sham.

This may be deduced from the proposed timetable: the Chapel Market development project consultation is in February / March; the follow-up traffic management order (TMO) consultation will be in April; and, the commencement of works will be in “early May 2023”, which will take “around nine months to complete”.

Nine months of works cannot be formulated in the time between the completion of the TMO consultation and the start of those works. Therefore it is clear that the works have already been planned in detail, and the consultations are merely to act as window-dressing, purportedly to provide support for whatever the council has decided already.

The flawed use of so-called consultations seems to be a weakness of this council. For example, the consultations on the various low traffic neighbourhoods, LTNs, that are to occur after such schemes have been in place for a long period, by which time it would be impractical to undo them. That is not giving the constituents a proper choice.

MICHAEL EDENBOROUGH, N1