The council planning department’s feeble case over the Heath Clark playing fields in Waddon has been thrown out by an unimpressed Planning Inspector, who ruled in favour of David Sullivan’s property company.
By BARRATT HOLMES, housing correspondent
Porn to be wild: David Sullivan, one of the directors of the Conegate property empire
One of the country’s most high-profile businessmen, David Sullivan, the billionaire former pornographer behind Sunday Sport and West Ham United, has managed to get the Planning Inspector onside to allow him to make even more dosh, this time by concreting over some former school football pitches in Waddon.
The case brought by Sullivan’s property company, Conegate, drew a withering condemnation of the half-baked case prepared by Croydon Council’s planners, who wanted to leave the land to be used for a school at some unspecified point in the future. “I found little detailed evidence from the council supporting the need for this site,” the Planning Inspector said in a damning ruling against the council.
By the end of the case, it was as if the ex-porn baron’s advisers had stripped Croydon planners naked, leaving them with nothing to cover their modesty. The Inspector’s decision reveals a planning department so broken that it can not make even the most basic case to defend its own Croydon Plan.
And the borough’s anti-development Mayor, part-time Jason Perry, who pledged before his election to safeguard the borough’s precious open spaces, has done nothing to retrieve another disaster at the hands of his council’s planning department.
The loss to development of the final part of the Heath Clark playing fields ought to be a major embarrassment for Croydon’s Tories – the site, off Duppas Hill, near Waddon Station, is in Conservative MP Chris Philp’s constituency – and also to the Labour councillors who helped to create the council’s “all but broken” planning department.
Concreting over Croydon: the Heath Clark playing fields have been neglected for decades
Under planning director Heather Cheesbrough, the council had reserved part of the old playing fields for a secondary school, supposedly to meet demand expected in the 2030s from families living in a revived Croydon town centre, when it is expected to have 17,000 new homes, with another 7,470 homes to be built along the Purley Way.
After the Heath Clark school closed in the 1980s, 163 homes were built on part of the site, what is now Old School Place. The remainder of the field has been left neglected, with no effort by the council to acquire it in order to extend the neighbouring Duppas Hill Park. For the last decade or more the field, lined by some mature trees, has been left as grazing for horses.
On another parcel of the playing field land the Hyde Group is already building 126 private and social housing units, in line with the Croydon Plan, a scheme which was granted permission by the council in 2020, much reducing the space for any new school.
The ruling from the Planning Inspector earlier this month means that the Croydon Plan has been overturned in the latest devastating blow to the credibility of Cheesbrough and her floundering council planning department.
Sullivan’s company, Conegate Ltd, had taken the case to the planning inspector on the basis of “non-determination”, after they lost patience with Croydon’s dysfunctional planning department, which had been sitting on the application for a year.
Permission has now been given for 140 homes along with a community centre – 23 homes for shared ownership and 34 for rental at “affordable” rents are part of the scheme. The homes could be worth more than £40million at current housing market prices once placed on the market.
Community centre: the Conegate scheme, unlike many, includes homes for ‘affordable’ rent and a neighbourhood centre
Conegate won out after doing their homework on Croydon’s costly school place planning.
The ruling reflects very badly on the regime under Labour’s Paul Scott, when expansion plans for Croydon schools were based on the Westfield-driven development boom that never happened. As Inside Croydon has been reporting since 2014, huge amounts of spending on unneeded new schools was wasted under Labour.
Independent inspectors are usually very cautious in the tone that they employ in giving their rulings. But Jonathan Price BA(Hons) DipTP MRTPI DMS was dismissive of Croydon’s planners’ level of effort at the appeal, as he gave the green light for Sullivan’s development company to send in its bulldozers.
Even before the hearing started, the council’s case for opposing the development had all but collapsed, with the planners meekly conceding all of its points except one, and started negotiating the financial terms that go with a successful appeal.
The issue left to be contested was the council’s claimed need for school places – this in a borough where two state secondaries have been forced to close in the last four years due to falling pupil numbers.
“The council’s case that this site might be needed seems somewhat unsubstantiated and lacking in the underpinning evidence to demonstrate that planned housing growth requires that a secondary school allocation is retained on Heath Clark North,” Price wrote, dismissively.
Conegate had dismantled the council’s case. “There is around 19per cent spare capacity spread amongst the borough’s state secondary schools,” the inspector wrote. “The council’s own forecasts show this to increase further from 5,238 places to 5,607 places by 2027-2028.”
When he joined the council in 2014 as a Labour councillor for Waddon, Andrew Pelling warned of the dangers of overestimating demand for school places. He tells Inside Croydon that he was warned at the time by Tony Newman’s Labour group not to express such concerns. Pelling was removed earlier this year as a Labour candidate for the council elections after a period of whistle-blowing about council governance.
In 2017, Pelling’s fellow Waddon Labour councillor Robert Canning expressed his own concern about the over-building of schools. Canning was also threatened with disciplinary action for expressing views. Canning chose not to run in May’s elections.
It is five years since Alisa Flemming, the then Labour cabinet member for education and children’s services, boasted that, “It’s fantastic to be able to announce that by 2020 more than 6,000 extra children will be able to be taught at local schools. Our population is growing fast, and I’m delighted to be able to reassure parents that they will not have to worry about whether their children will be able to get into a local school.”
Wasted millions: when Paul Scott was in charge, the council created 5,000 excess secondary school places, and some very happy architects
By 2022, just 762 of those 6,000 extra school places of which Flemming boasted are actually filled.
Scott had his fingerprints all over the loss of Green Belt land, used to build one of the new schools, Coombe Wood, the Folio Trust secondary school on Coombe Road. The £30million school was designed with all the lacklustre charm of an American High School on the local freeway, fed by a huge car park out front and housed in crass, huge hangar-style buildings. At the time, Inside Croydon reported that there were already 5,000 excess secondary places in Croydon.
The competition for pupils provided by Coombe Wood played a big part in bringing about the closure of the Church of England St Andrew’s School.
This now-vacant school just up the hill was included in the Planning Inspector’s deliberations over the Heath Clark fields. “The St Andrew’s site is quite small, but larger than the appeal site and the council already owns the playing fields.
“There might be constraints in bringing forward a mainstream school here, including the terms of the lease to the current occupier. However, given that this site is already in educational use, which the Diocese wishes to maintain, such constraints seem to me to be significantly less than those involved in bringing forward a school at Heath Clark North.”
The Inspector thought the Heath Clark site to be too small for a secondary school. “I consider that the roughly 1.9 hectares that remain significantly limits the offer Heath Clark North can make in contributing to Croydon’s future secondary education needs.
“There would likely be a reliance on using part of the Duppas Hill Recreation Ground for school sports fields, and the allocation makes no reference to this. Looking at the arguments, acknowledging some advantage of adjacency to the Recreation Ground, I consider the relatively small size of this appeal site constrains its role in meeting future secondary education needs. This factor would further diminish the likelihood of finding a school user for this allocation.”
Among the risible arguments put forward by Croydon Council’s planners, they suggested that the war in Ukraine, the downturn in the economy, possible increased demand after 2027, plans for new homes on Purley Way and the long failed attempts to tempt Croydon parents away from sending their children to grammar schools in Sutton and Bromley, were all reasons for keeping the Heath Clark land for a school.
Embarrassment: planning director Heather Cheesbrough
The Inspector said the council’s case was “not persuasive”, and that he saw little chance of the land ever being needed for a school.
“On the balance of probabilities, having considered the evidence provided, I consider there to be no reasonable prospect of Heath Clark North coming forward for the secondary school use…
“The council cites the current situation in the Ukraine, and the migrant influx associated with that particular crisis. The evidence is that in recent years long-term international migration has been the main reason for the borough’s population growth.
“However, as the appellant has shown, this has been more than compensated for by out-migration from Croydon to elsewhere in the UK. Net migration in Croydon is not shown to be a factor having a particular bearing upon the requirement for maintaining this secondary school allocation, or the likely prospect of it being taken up.”
Sullivan’s advisers had seen to it that Croydon’s planners had been caught with their pants down.
- If you have a news story about life in or around Croydon, or want to publicise your residents’ association or business, or if you have a local event to promote, please email us with full details at inside.croydon@btinternet.com
- By having a comment section, we provide all readers with an immediate “right of reply” on all our content. Details of how this works can be read by clicking here
- Inside Croydon works together with the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, as well as BBC London News and ITV London
- Inside Croydon: 3.3million page views in 2021. Seen by 1.6million unique visitors in that 12-month period
