who put the con in consultation!
another hour was spent this afternoon going round the houses, this time with the council planning officers
the consultation seemed reasonably well attended (about 25-30 people when i was there), however the average age of consultees when i was there did appear to be about 60, probably reflecting the fact that for most, the timing of the consultation made it awkward to attend, hopefully a few more people made it along in the last hour or so of it
i raised the usual two issues at the session, one being the provision of affordable housing and the other being the lack of investment in the community infrastructure to cope with the the pressures that will be put upon existing infrastructure once the development is completed
On affordable housing, we went through the usual hoops which have been documented here a number of times - the usual starting point for these conversations is referring to the mayoral target in the london plan of 50% of all new developments to be affordable, they then point out that that’s just a target, and not many boroughs adopt that target in their own local strategy. Prior to going along today, i had a skim through the latest monitoring report on the london plan, which shows that only 6 boroughs out of 33 have failed to bring in the 50% target to their local strategy. Obviously when this was pointed out they then point out that not many boroughs actually meet those targets, which is why lewisham have opted for a more sensible/realistic target of 35% provision. However the latest monitoring report also states that over the last 3 years lewisham have only provided 22% affordable housing across all developments, this seemed to be news to the planning officers, so in a bid to deflect attention away from that put forward the argument that for this development they were providing 57% affordable housing.
I explained that 21% of that wasn’t affordable housing as it didn’t need to be sold as affordable to key workers in the first place and even if it was there is no restriction on key workers who buy, subsequently selling the place on the open market the following day after securing the purchase. So this then knocked of 21% of their 57% bringing it down to 36% which they then claimed was still fine as it was above their target. I pointed out that if their current 3 year average is only 22% they would have to ensure above target provision on some pretty big developments to get even close to their target, with things like the lewisham gateway scheme only offering 20% (and potentially even less) i asked how they were going to manage that. In reply they said that lewisham already had a huge amount of affordable housing so it didn’t really matter if they met their targets, i then pointed out that existing affordable housing in places like milford towers & the excalibur estate were a long way off the decent homes standard and would probably be demolished at some point, so how on earth can that argument work. As usual a bit of flap & fluster followed by the usual stuff about if they ask for more affordable provision the development wouldn’t go ahead with a heavly implication that if that happened then it would be all my fault!
further discussion about affordable targets ensued, which ended up with the planning officer saying that basically all they can do is hope to achieve their planned 35% provision, but if a developer isn’t happy to do it, they have no powers to enforce it, admitting they are very much at the mercy of the developers (and their money). And this appears to be the crux of the matter, money decides - not the council, nor its electorate. The provision of what should be a basic human right, a roof over you head, has been pushed further and further into the hands of private capital, who in good times can make money out of this, but in bad times and downturn, like the one we’re coming into now, they won’t make the money out of it so they won’t deliver - where will that leave the wise people in charge of our lives who put so much faith in the ability of the private sector to provide public goods?
After skating not terribly impressively on thin ice around the affordable housing question for some time, the point was raised by the planning officer about the additional investments in the community infrastructure that would come along with the development, this seemed like a good time to raise the estimated 17% increase in peak time rail travel that the development will bring about. I asked them if they were comfortable with the assumption in the transport assessment documentation that says because rail usage has decreased over the last couple of years, then they expect the observed decrease to continue for the next 6 years so by the time the development is complete in 2014 the 17% increase in rail usage will have no affect on existing passengers. The first reaction to that was a comment that they don’t think rail usage has went down in the last two years! I agreed and pointed out that at the developers consultation two weeks ago they had stated that the council had seen, and were happy with, these assumptions. To this i received no response, as almost on cue they then went on to talk about how the stations will be tarted up, new cycle paths provided etc.. I said that as welcome as these things are they do not address the issue in question and alleviate the concerns about the impact on public transport infrastructure, to this i received the reply that they think that it does alleviate my concerns, which i thought was nice, members of the public seem to be unable now to decide for themselves whether their concerns are alleviated or not - who put the con in consultation? well lewisham council probably didn’t put it there in the first place but their doing a grand job of ensuring it stays there
as with the previous consultation i only got to raise these two issues and was unable in the time alloted to me to raise other issues like the impact on road congestion, existing local tenants in non decent homes getting first refusal on homes in the new development, the contradictions of urging people to use public transport more yet assuming the amount of people who use public transport will get less, the pointlessness of allowing one person 5 minutes to speak at any planning committee when it is clear that for developments like this community objections will be multi-faceted and often conflicting. Annoyingly on both consultations because of the amount of time I had to spend getting the representatives to even agree with me on statements of facts about the development (i.e. the effort required to cut through all their bullshit) before i could even raise the concern about it, meant that I was unable to raise all these other issues that i wanted to raise.
One thing i did notice though with both this and the previous consultation is the almost visible draining of colour in the faces of the represenatives as they begin to realise that you actually know what your talking about in terms of the facts in relation to both the specific development and the wider issues - and i wonder just how often when people havn’t ploughed through the details of the documentation, this fact is taken advantage off. it certainly was at the previous, developers consultation, however with this one i got the impression there was more honesty about the facts of the thing, however a lot more spin on them as well. On a number of occasions the planning officer appeared visibly flustered and often lost for words, which did give some sense of satisfaction (in terms of knowing the issues i was raising were genuine ones which couldn’t easily be brushed aside), not that that makes much difference in the overall scheme of things though, but it’s nice to know your on the right track
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Posted by ross