Essay by Eric Worrall
First published JoNova; Ordinary residents of trial cities will only be permitted 100 days per year outside their 15 minute region. But special people get a free pass.
Labour council brings in ‘perverse’ 15-minute driving rules – it could roll out across UK
Labour ministers have drawn up plans to hand councils powers to bring in 15-minute cities branded ‘Stalinist’ and ‘perverse’.
By Aaron Newbury
10:18, Sun, Jan 25, 2026 Updated: 10:41, Sun, Jan 25, 2026Sir Keir Starmer will introduce 15-minute cities across the country with critics slamming them as ‘Stalinist’ and ‘perverse’ , it has been revealed.
…
15-minute cities are a new concept based on the idea that a person living in one will be able to access everything they need within a quarter of an hour by walking or cycling. They are sometimes accompanied by restrictions on motorists.
Oxford, which is actively implementing a plan to introduce the scheme, has seen its local authority plot to divide the city into six “15-minute neighbourhoods”. This would see drivers needing to secure a permit for residents so that they could travel for 100 days for free through the traffic filters in the city.
A separate permit would allow just 25 days of free travel, with drivers hit with fines should they move around the city beyond those allocated days.
…
Read more: https://www.express.co.uk/life-style/cars/2162240/labour-council-perverse-15-minute-driving-rules-roll-out-across-uk-oxford
Advocates have defended the scheme;
…
For some conspiracy theorists, this has come to mean an attack on freedom, arguing that people will be restricted from leaving their homes and forced to live within a 15-minute radius of where they live.
This has been widely debunked.
Nicholas Boys Smith, the chairman of urban planning think tank Create Streets, has written widely on the subject.
He said: “If you live in any neighbourhood built before the 1950s then the chances are you already do live in a place with some or many of the characteristics of a 15-minute city and are able (more or less) to walk to the pub, to the corner shop or to a nearby school. If you are richer, then you are more likely to live in such a place.”
…
Other users asked: “Why is having amenities near people a bad thing?” Or described the concept as “a dream”.
Oxfordshire County Council confirmed to Big Issue that the proposed traffic filters trial has nothing to do with the concept of 15-minute cities.
Councillor Andrew Gant, Oxfordshire County Council’s cabinet member for transport management, told Big Issue: “I read the article in the Daily Express and my jaw nearly hit the floor. I mean, it is a quite extraordinary misrepresentation of what this scheme does.
…
Read more: https://www.bigissue.com/news/environment/15-minute-cities-sharron-davies-right-said-fred/
Why would anyone choose to travel more than 15 minutes from home?
Because something they need is more than 15 minutes away, of course.
If everything you need is within 15 minutes of home, lucky you. But if everything you need is the wrong side of one of those “traffic filters”, this new law is going to hurt.
If your kid’s school is the wrong side of one of these “traffic filters”, does this mean you need to find your kid a new school? Like the awful school just down the road which you rejected in favour of the 20 minute drive to the better quality school?
Do you now have to put up with the overpriced corner store, when there is a much better supermarket 20 minutes drive from your house?
The suggestion people should use more public transport or cycle more to avoid the new 15 minute city restrictions is absurd. Not only is British weather cold and rainy much of the time, from 2024 to 2025 there was a 10% uptick in bike robberies in Oxford. Driving in a locked vehicle is more comfortable and far safer than using public transport or riding a bike down lonely tracks, especially for women returning home from late shift work.
These new laws restricting travel are a recipe for hurting ordinary people, people who aren’t well connected enough to get a special pass.
If local governments had attempted to actually create 15 minute cities, by working to improve the availability of local amenities, I would not have had a problem with that. But there would still be lots of people who have to travel further than 15 minutes, for work or school or taking care of elderly relatives, or any number of other reasons.
Punishing people who are already doing it tough, in the hope magic 15 minute eco-cities will somehow arise out of the cruelty being inflicted on ordinary people, that’s just nasty.
This is fake. None of the links in the article substantiate anything that is being claimed here, and they are all internal links going to other articles on the same website. The first link discusses a tax rule change for pubs. This has nothing to do with 15-minute cities or 15-minute anything. This is pure spam.
Watts Up With That? needs to take this post down and apologize for it.
Links posted by MC do show the totalitarian agenda behind the 15 minute ghetto agenda.
“If local governments had attempted to actually create 15 minute cities, by working to improve the availability of local amenities, I would not have had a problem with that.”
Really?
In the school example I provided, if they worked to fix failing schools in their district, people wouldn’t have to drive for miles to take their kids to a decent school. That is what I mean by “improve the availability of local amenities”.
“In the school example I provided, if they worked to fix failing schools in their district, people wouldn’t have to drive for miles to take their kids to a decent school.”
Totally agree Eric. Let’s fund state schools so well they can compete with private ones.
C40 in action.
Another “conspiracy theory” come true.
“Why would anyone choose to travel more than 15 minutes from home?”
Because they want to do. End of story.
The current UK government has betrayed 1000 years of British culture – the only culture from which individual freedom organically grew.
The culture and people of John Locke and Thomas Paine, violated to its very core.
The evil of Keir Starmer and his sycophantic crew (Nicholas Boys Smith, Andrew Gant and the rest) could not be more vile.
Under feudalism the peasants had to get their lord’s permission in order to leave the village they grew up in.
Britain is rapidly becoming a high-tech feudal state with the Lanyard Class (academics, journalists, civil servants etc) as the new aristocracy.
To justify these restrictions by asking “Why would anyone choose to travel more than 15 minutes from home?” is to entirely miss the point of those who object.
It should be entirely irrelevant to you why a person should make this or any other choice if it does not affect you materially. Even then, your rights do not automatically trump someone else’s. Nor should it be a concern of the government.
Keir Starmer is the most dangerous PM the UK has ever seen. Rights are being stripped from citizens at an alarming rate – and the legacy media support him to the hilt. Do they not see what happens to the media in communist states? Starmer is moving the UK towards authoritarian Marxist government at an incredible and very scary rate. It is as though he has modelled himself on Goldstein in 1984. He is clearly an admirer of Stalin and Xi Jinping.
“To justify these restrictions by asking “Why would anyone choose to travel more than 15 minutes from home?””
You are not quoting someone justifying these restrictions. You are quoting Eric Worrall.
Is Worrall wrong?
Of course.
NO, he isn’t. !! Nick is the one that is wrong… and provably so.
Reality is that they could just build the amenities to encourage people shop mainly in the “15 minute” area…
but they choose to do it the authoritarianism way
They need to do it WITHOUT all the tracking, limits on travel, road filters and blockages, permits, fines and mandates etc etc.
Why are Brits tolerating this BS?
Most people loathe these restrictions.
“If you are richer, then you are more likely to live in such a place.”
I’d be willing to wager that very few residents of ‘wealthy’ neighborhoods are employed within a 15 minute radius. But those are the ones who can afford the ‘special permits’.
This would mean that businesses would only get revenues from people living within fifteen minutes of their business. How would that affect major shopping areas, entertainment districts, public facilities like parks and museums, amusement parks, sports games, beaches, and luxury establishments who depend on drawing customers from a wide area? And most people will be conservative of the use of their 100 days, ‘just in case’ of an emergency. Those 100 days would disappear fast if you visit homebound relatives or family members in senior citizen facilities.
But the bottom line is, with the cost of personal transportation and fuel, who drives farther away than fifteen minutes unless they need to, now? And if they need to, they should not be restricted to travel.
I have personal knowledge of a major technical exposition which has relocated from Oxford to Manchester due to the onerous requirements of running such an event in Oxford. When exhibitors had to load into the show, there was no provision for parking delivery vehicles. They had to drive in, unload, then depart the city center, park remotely, and then walk or take public transit back to the venue. It was a major waste of time and resources, and forced exhibitors to take on average another half day longer (load in and out) than it would take in a more welcoming location. It also discouraged out of town attendees as they also had to park remotely. It was a mess.
Is this really the freedom that your ancestors fraught Hitler for?
These people are ignorant idiots if they think I can have a choice of several hospitals, Several home improvement centers, several supermarkets, several high paying specialty jobs, this means my wife and I have BOTH to find nearby jobs.
DId I say the perpetrators of this are basically ignorant, idiot, uncaring, unthinking ascists?
When Reform comes in at the next election this will all be washed down the sink. And perhaps the little dictators will be locked up.
The next General Election cannot come a day sooner.
Another good reason to vote Reform UK
In The Netherlands everything is outside a 15 min radius because of the traffic jams.
I had talked to my mother about this concept of “15 minute cities.” She replied: “When I was young, it was like that!” She was right. But in the 1970s, you didn’t risk being stabbed at every turn or getting beaten up for looking into the eyes of a thug on the subway; likewise, local schools, colleges and high schools were not nests of thugs where well-behaved children were tormented by gangs of cowards who come with switchblades in their schoolbags. Plus, there weren’t all these databases containing everything about your life (including things you don’t know about yourself, but which the algorithms deduced by cross-referencing your search results), and you weren’t constantly being stalked by surveillance cameras.
There are those who call it “conspiracy” about people who worry about what the West is becoming. Really ? Liu Xiaobo, Chinese dissident who died in prison and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010 for his heroic opposition to the communist dictatorship (pleonasm), must be, in this case, the great leader of the BFASC (brotherhood of fanatical anti-socialist conspiracists.)
As long as we’re talking about Nobel Peace Prize winners: there are some, like Liu Xiaobo, who die in prison for rebelling against a terrifying regime; there are some, like Malala Yousafzai, who were shot by the religious extremists in power, simply for shouting loudly that girls had the right to go to school; and others, like Al Gore, who make a bad Oscar-winning film, terrify children with false information, make hundreds of millions with a carbon credit system by not depriving themselves of traveling in a private jet, and having splendid properties by the sea (knowing that the sea coasts will soon be swallowed up, what courage !), and spend their time telling people how mediocre and selfish they are in their “little Western comfort”, which mainly consists of not living in poverty in which macerates an entire part of the world which also needs to develop.
For those of us working , it would mean a very restricted employment, which of course would push wages down and what about tradesmen in these areas ? How could they operate if just limited to 15 walk or cycle
I would add to my previous comment that one can very well see no problem with these kinds of government initiatives, if they are done for everyone’s comfort. After all, who likes congested roads and air thick with exhaust fumes? Absolutely no one.
But widespread surveillance, license plate recognition with automatic fines for violations—the mere fact that you are literally given a permit to drive is frankly frightening. Eventually, a black market might emerge, like with rationing after the war (which addressed a real need, given the widespread shortages).
Good heavens, it’s not up to the government to decide for me whether or not I want to be stuck in traffic. Once was more than enough for me to find another way to get where I want to go.
A typical fact-checking example: “No, people won’t be confined to ’15-minute zones’.”
Well, thank goodness! The fact that digital control is becoming formalized, accompanied by financial coercion, seems worrying enough as it is.
The State decides what’s best for you, and if you don’t agree… But everyone agrees, right?…
When I was talking about the lack of subtlety in automatic translation…
When I say, “the mere fact that you are literally given a permit to drive is frankly frightening,”
it’s not the need for a driver’s license that concerns me, but the fact that a permit is required to drive in certain places.
What will happen is that “15 minute cities” will enforce goods and services monopolies. No need to be competitive if your competition is 16 minutes away from your customer.
Funny to recall that a few years ago I made a post about “15 minute cities” on social media and got censored for “misinformation”. Funny, that. Another example of:
A) No, that’s not a thing.
B) Well, it might be a thing, but it’s rare and isolated.
C) Yes, it is a thing. You have a problem with that, hater?
Sure am glad I had the good sense to be born where we got rid of nonsense like this about 250 years ago. Although we have our own nincompoops in power who would love to do this too, who were elected by nincompoops.
Nowadays there never seems to be a shortage of nincompoops anywhere. Is it because of CO2?
Oxfordshire County Council is Liberal Democrat controlled not Labour controlled. Oddly the citizens of Oxfordshire voted for the Lib Dems in last year’s County Council election even though it was well-known that the Lib Dems favoured these “traffic filters”.
There are so few burglars caught and sent to prison let alone many others for a vaiety of serious crimes but the police in England are going to have the time and resources to enforce the 15 minute regulation? The priority list of the government is back to front.
The link with the text “Sir Keir Starmer will introduce 15-minute cities” leads to an article about a pub tax.
Which is just a bad !! 🙂
Yes, that’s what I said above. The whole article is fake. WUWT needs to retract this post and apologize for it. They fell for some obvious clickbait fake news and will not admit it. Of even more concern are the other commenters here who simply aren’t acknowledging this and are downvoting me for saying it.
Gym, swimming pool, golf club – they’re my “essentials” !5 minute walk carrying my clubs. Don’t think so.
Those trolls supporting the IMPOSITION of 15 minute cities and all their rules and regulations..
.. are exposing themselves as totalitarian Marxists.
Is it because that are just stupid.. or because they hate the concept of personal freedom ??