Wednesday 9 June 2021

Remembering Alastair Hanton, by his son Angus

Alastair Hanton (1926 - 2021) - Social entrepreneur and banking innovator 

 

Alastair Hanton introduced Direct Debit to the UK, started National Girobank, founded the Fair Trade Foundation, and through his transport campaigning saved countless lives. He achieved a remarkable amount of change over a long life of persistent enterprise and collaboration. 

 

At Cambridge Alastair read mathematics and economics but seems also to have studied kindness: all three subjects were to guide the following 75 years.  In 1948 he joined the Government’s CDC (the Commonwealth Development Corporation) which planned the building of hospitals and roads in the poorest countries.  One of these was Malawi, in East Africa, where Alastair was sent in 1950, travelling by ship and train, and stopping off in South Africa where he was horrified to see the beginnings of apartheid - against which he later fought.  After several years he moved back to Britain, met his future wife, Margaret, at a set of traffic lights, and they based their life and family in Dulwich.  In 1957 he joined ICFC (now 3i), a company nurturing new enterprises.  A year later he took a job in Unilever’s Economics and Statistics division and studied what made companies work optimally, doing job evaluation, and time-and-motion studies - which was to prove useful in his later work.  While at Unilever he identified the problem of collecting money from regular customers - such as small shops - so he determined to introduce an efficient system whereby money could come direct from the customers’ accounts and, as he put it, “be taken in variable amounts at variable times.”  After a long struggle with the banking establishment he succeeded in introducing his system to the UK and Direct Debit was born. 

 

In the mid-1960s he worked for RTZ (now Rio Tinto) analysing investment opportunities and using discounted cash flow (DCF) techniques.  He had helped to develop these analytical methods with his friends AJ Merritt and Allen Sykes, contributing ideas to their seminal book, “The Finance and Analysis of Capital Projects.”  Alastair was one of a number of pioneers of DCF techniques which are a fundamental tool of the investment community. 

 

Alastair became concerned that millions of ordinary people in the UK had no bank accounts and no access to financial services, so when in 1968 Harold Wilson’s modernising government suggested setting up a state bank he was given the job of running it.  The new National Girobank used the ready-made network of 20,000 post offices to bring banking to the “unbanked” giving them the means of saving, using cheques and being paid monthly directly into their bank accounts. By the time he retired in 1986 Girobank had 5,000 employees and had transformed banking: they had introduced computing, offered the novelty of free bank accounts, and empowered millions with their first bank account. Alastair’s team very deliberately located the bank’s operations in Merseyside (Bootle) because they wanted to create jobs in one of the most impoverished parts of de-industrialising Britain, even though it committed him personally to commuting regularly on the overnight sleeper train between London and Liverpool. 

 

Despite running a national bank full-time, he found time to set up several campaigns and charities such as the Ethical Investment Research and Information Service (EIRIS) which helped ordinary investors to influence how companies behaved.  Through EIRIS, Alastair and Peter Webster were enabling the UK’s first ethical investment funds – which could, for example, choose to avoid tobacco or weapons manufacturers.  He believed that it mattered how individuals use their assets and he demonstrated that by sharing his house in the 1960s with a young Nigerian family and left the bulk of his estate to Christian Aid and other charities. 

 

Alastair was instrumental in setting up new organisations over a period of 50 years. His formula for creating change was this: work out a logical vision of what needs doing, collaborate with others, be persistent and patient, and never say anything unkind.  After he retired he used this approach in dozens of new campaigns mostly for better public transport. 

 

As a child Alastair had witnessed the carnage caused by the introduction of the motor car and in the 1970s he was appalled by an annual death toll of more than 7,000 lives and thousands of life-changing injuries.  By 1980 the company car tax perks had massively distorted travel and led to a damaging increase in car usage. He wanted these tax breaks 

abolished and formed the Transport Taxation Group to take on the motoring lobby in persuading the government to remove the tax distortions. The ultimate success of this fight contributed to the cut in annual road deaths by two thirds to 1,700 and even this year he was working to reduce that number further. 

 

On retirement he became chairman of Christian Aid and the leadership team redirected the whole organisation - they pivoted towards empowering local people of all faiths and campaigning for systemic change. He would often ask at meetings, “but what are we actually going to do about this?”  One such meeting was a Quaker-led Trade Justice group where he asked if the power of consumers could be harnessed.  The group, which he led, became the Fair Trade Foundation and invented a process by which, in exchange for being permitted to use the “Fair Trade” label on coffee, tea and bananas, the supermarkets would guarantee the payment of a fairer price to producers as well as paying a small royalty.  As a result, farmers - like the ones he had known in Malawi in the early 1950s - would be able to lift themselves out of poverty. Fair Trade has helped millions of people as well as raising the profile of trade justice. 

 

Alastair loved campaigning because it combined two his two favourite activities - making new friends and creating change.  He set up and supported dozens of traffic calming projects locally in London and nationally to save lives, improve quality of life, and build community.  One of these was the ETA (Environmental Transport Association) a green alternative to the AA and RAC. Another was his campaign for lorry safety after he discovered how many road deaths involved unsighted lorry drivers reversing or turning left.  He worked on the “20’s Plenty” initiative to spread 20mph zones in residential areas nationwide which is a direct response to the logarithmic link between a vehicle’s speed and its lethality. He developed Road Peace which memorialised a road death and then used the facts of the case to help traffic planners to make that location safer for others. 

 

Alastair chaired Living Streets, an organisation that lobbies nationally for pedestrian schemes and safer, healthier public spaces and modes of travel.  Locally he was a founder of the Dulwich Society and was an activist for traffic calming and car-free places across Southwark. A typical project was the creation of Herne Hill “Square” which took a team of local activists 10 years to achieve but has enabled the establishment of a Sunday market and a pedestrian zone at the heart of the community. 

 

His interest was always in identifying the most important issues where change was possible. Rebuilding the Herne Hill Velodrome was one such and although it took several years the result was the creation of place where thousands of young people are learning to love cycling as he did.  This passion started when he and his brother Graham cycled back to London from Cumbria, where their school had been evacuated to.  Much later, in his “retirement”, he chaired the London Cycling Campaign which lobbies for healthier travel and, as he put it, “tries to tame the car menace.”  He rode his bike for almost all journeys within London until he was 90 and Southwark Council recently used a picture of him on his bike as their “poster boy”. 

 

When he was almost 90 he and Simon Norton, a maths genius, established a new charity, the Foundation for Integrated Transport (FIT).  This has become the leading grant-giving and campaigning charity for creating greener transport in the UK.  Although Alastair spent the last few years building up FIT with Stephen Joseph and the Norton family, he continued to champion car-free transport in Dulwich including working with the Dulwich Safer Routes to School project. 

 

Beyond campaigning, his other great hobbies were forestry and the church. In forestry he promoted the idea that individuals could own, manage and enjoy their own small area of woodland.  Apart from his own woodland in East Sussex where he practiced hands-on forestry, he actively supported projects to spread wider woodland ownership.  Closer to home he managed the Methodist Church Hall for 60 years and deliberately turned it into a community centre used intensively, for people of all faiths and of none. 

 

Many of his efforts were never acknowledged but he didn’t care: as he explained to the family, quoting US President Harry Truman,  “it’s amazing what you can achieve if you don’t mind who takes the credit”. 



Tuesday 9 February 2021

Feb 2021 Statement from Dulwich & Herne Hill Safe Routes to School

 Statement from Dulwich and Herne Hill Safe Routes to School (SRS) - Feb 2021

 

Safe Routes to School Dulwich & Herne Hill (SRS) is comprised of representatives from all the schools in this area. Its members are staff and/or parents at the schools.

 

The group was formed over a decade ago with a specific goal: to support and engage with all relevant parties to enable children to travel to school safely, actively and healthily and, where appropriate, independently. We support measures which enable safe walking and cycling, as well as those to reduce traffic, which will in turn reduce road danger and improve air quality. 

 

School representatives of SRS promote activities within the schools, share best practice and views from the schools and seek to provide support to the schools in the execution of their Travel Plans, most of which have Gold Accreditation.

 

SRS seeks to engage responsibly in local consultations on traffic and travel measures. As part of those consultations we support measures which we believe further our aim: safe, active travel for children to and from school. Over the years since its formation, the members of SRS have gained significant experience and understanding of traffic and travel issues. We appreciate that sometimes engagement will be challenging and require compromise.

 

SRS was one of many participants in the Dulwich Our Healthy Streets (OHS) engagement, which involved extensive consultation by Southwark Council with the local community over several months during 2019-2020.  SRS supported OHS’s objectives of improved active travel measures, increased road safety, reduced traffic and improved air quality.

 

SRS recognises that the current Experimental Traffic Orders (ETOs) are trials, which are to include consultation with the community. The ETOs include most of the proposed measures of OHS and as such received qualified support from SRS. We support the objectives of the measures and are engaging with the Council on the details, in the absence of any other proposals which deliver our aims. 

 

Part of the role of SRS is to respond to consultations and proposals made by the authorities. We believe the measures in place in general promote safe travel for children to school, but as members of the local community we do not underestimate the consequential challenges or difficulties for other stakeholders.

 

For many years our schools have received protests about the dangers to children posed by the volume of road traffic and unsafe driving and parking in our area. SRS has consistently sought to find ways to work with the relevant authorities to address these issues.

 

We will be glad to hear suggestions which enable our goal of safe and active travel for children but will respond formally only to consultations initiated by the relevant authority. 

Friday 15 January 2021

Schools support permeable filters at Dulwich Village and Melbourne Grove

 SRS response to Southwark Streetspace Phase 1: 16 December 2020

 

TMO2021-EXP02_LSP

 

We write to express our continued support for the permeable filters in Dulwich Village and Melbourne Grove South which have now reached their six month review.

 

As well as achieving immediate road safety gains, we are seeing modal shift in Dulwich.

 

The gains:

 

·      Safe crossings, where previously they were dangerous, at Court Lane / Dulwich Village and Calton Avenue / Dulwich Village

·      Improved safety, as a result of a reduction in motor traffic, at Court Lane and Dulwich Park

·      Improved safety, as a result of a reduction in motor traffic, at Calton Avenue and Townley Road

·      Improved safety, as a result of a reduction in motor traffic, at Melbourne Grove south side and East Dulwich Grove

·      Safe cycling space on Court Lane 

·      Improved cycling safety on Quietway 7 on Calton Avenue and linking with Townley Road, as a result of the reduction in motor traffic

·      Firm evidence of increased cycling to school, including recent academic study by Dr Anna Goodman showing an increase in cycling, particularly by children (see attached), and school surveys of pupils, staff and parents

 

In addition, we are seeing an increasing demand from staff and parents of the schools for measures that will support a move away from cars, to benefit the environment and to improve road safety.

 

Observations suggest that there does not appear to be significant increased traffic congestion on East Dulwich Grove or Lordship Lane as a consequence, although we await data from the Council. 

 

Combined with the new school street at Hillsboro Rd, a safe route has been created between East Dulwich and the village schools. Combined with phase 2 measures, we have the beginnings of a safe route from the west of Dulwich Village Ward to village schools. Between them we are beginning to see the formation of an active travel network. 

 

We believe the evidence and trends to date merit the continuation of the trial.

 

We are aware of a significant amount of reporting from objectors to these schemes about consultation and the reasonableness of the measures, sometimes erroneously citing school’s support for these objections.

 

In response, we would like to say that we have been grateful throughout for the extensive amount of consultation as part of Our Healthy Streets and the ongoing opportunity to feedback views on the progress of the trial.

 

We are very closely in touch with all our schools and they support the implementation of Phase 1.

 

It is inevitable that if we are to work towards the Council's climate target that car use must be discouraged. To reduce car journeys may seem unreasonable to some in the short term, but this is one means within the Council’s power of addressing its climate emergency goals and in the longer term will result in active travel, road safety and clean air. Therefore, we support these measures as part of the mechanism for achieving that common goal.

 

 

 

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