Tight site: the local community group had been encouraged to work up a proposal for flats on the green at The Lawns by City Hall and Croydon Council
Five years’ work has been wasted after Croydon Council planners rejected a planning application from a community group in Upper Norwood to build seven not-for-profit flats in a scheme instigated by… Croydon Council.
BARRATT HOLMES, housing correspondent, reports
An enterprising group in Upper Norwood which has been encouraged by Croydon Council to put together a community building project for seven affordable homes has been left “shocked” that five years’ work has been wasted after their planning application was refused… by Croydon Council.
The council planning department had been sitting on application from the Crystal Palace Community Land Trust for more than a year, before the same organisation that had instigated the project in 2018 rejected the application for seven flats on land off The Lawns.
The project – the kind of thing that would attract admiring comments from Kevin McCloud’s Grand Designs telly programme – has had support, and promises of significant grant funding, from the Greater London Authority (though much, much less than the £100million subsidy that City Hall effectively provided for the for-profit The Fold residential block).
The site is on land leased from Croydon Council, an “in-fill site” that had been rejected as too difficult to develop by Brick by Brick, the council’s own, failed building firm. The Community Land Trust also received considerable pre-application advice from… Croydon Council’s planners.
In August last year, after years of careful and diligent work by volunteers, aided by legal and planning professionals, their fees paid for out of the funding that they had managed to raise, they submitted the application for the “Erection of a part two- and part three-storey building to contain seven flats, with associated site alterations including the provision of car and cycle parking and a vehicle turning area” on land adjoining 36 to 46 The Lawns, Upper Norwood.
The site is one of those green spaces between existing, 1960s-built blocks of flats, on a steep slope. Small and awkward for building contractors, not all neighbours were enthusiastic about turning their green into a building site.
Official threat: council planner Nicola Townsend
At the start of this month, council planners finally got round to issuing their report on the planning application, submitted under the authority of Nicola Townsend, the council’s head of planning management – that is, Croydon’s chief planner. The document is full of passive aggression, with red lines drawn down the side of a page of warnings of the dire consequences and personal liability for anyone should they dare take the decision to appeal. It is nothing other than an official threat from Fisher’s Folly.
The reasons given for rejecting the application might have been used to thwart any one of the majority of applications submitted in recent years by the council’s builders, Brick by Brick, or by the profit-hungry private developers with a penchant for building block after block of flats. Some of those developers have very close connections to council planning staff.
“The development, due to its poor quality and insensitive flat roof design with externally supported balconies would visually conflict with the surrounding built form and be harmful to the character and appearance of area,” the planners’ report states.
“The proposed development due to its scale and close distance in relation to habitable
room windows at 36-46 The Lawns would result in loss of light and outlook,” they add.
“The close proximity of the pedestrian access routes and communal facilities to these windows would also result in a harmful loss of privacy and disturbance. As such, the proposal would be harmful to the neighbouring living conditions…”, which was probably something of which the council would have been aware in 2018, when they first suggested that Brick by Brick build on the same plot.
Site map: The Lawns scheme has been five years in the making, only to be thwarted by the very people who instigated it
“The proposed development fails to provide a policy compliant dwelling mix on site, in
conflict with the borough wide requirement for 30% three-bed homes as needed for families.” Yeah, because that trumps the need for seven homes built in the midst of a housing crisis, from a local authority that has failed abysmally to provide new council homes.
Oh, and that pre-application planning service provided by the council? “In this instance the pre-application advice was not adhered to,” the Townsend report states.
The board of the trustees issued this statement last night: “We are shocked and disappointed that Croydon Council’s planning officers have refused our application…
“After winning a competition for the site with the council in 2019, local people have volunteered thousands of hours to design a not-for-profit proposal that is sensitive to neighbours and maximises the affordability of the homes.
“We’re so proud of how the local community has come together to try and build homes for people priced out of the area. We don’t want this effort to be wasted, so we intend to appeal.
“We have worked closely with the council throughout the process,” the trustees’ statement says. They describe the ground for refusal as “subjective”.
Official support: Tom Copley (right), the deputy mayor of London for housing, gave his seal of approval for The Lawns scheme last year, as the application was being submitted
“We have explained that the changes the planners sought would make it too expensive to provide affordable homes. Over the past five years we have door-knocked residents three times and consulted widely to understand concerns about infill developments like these.
“We brought together 18 local people, representative of the area in terms of age, income, race and housing need to set our objectives and work with the architects on the design that could best achieve them. Their objectives were affordability, environmental standards and sensitivity to neighbours. We believe we have resolved these as best we can.”
One Katharine Street source told Inside Croydon today, “It’s a very poor decision. The fact the council have led them down the garden path says a lot. The CLT being successful at appeal would be a success for the council, showing how you can do infill housing differently.”
And another Town Hall veteran said, “The council’s planning department under director Heather Cheesbrough is a law unto itself. Councillors who have called for Cheesbrough to be sacked for her failings and the department’s conflicts of interest have been silenced.
“It took them a year to cobble together this embarrassing and deliberately insulting, threatening planning refusal? This is just another example of how the planning department is out of control.”
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This so-called Community Group is just a fig leave for a bunch of chancers, or as they are more commonly known …property developers. Local volunteers that devoted 100s of hours of their time to this worthwhile scheme. Pull the other one.
Sounds like a crap design that deserved to be binned by the planning department.
Er, given nobody in the group is paid or will make any money, and minutes of meetings are published on the website, sounds like you’ve pulled the wrong one!
Why would the Council approve this? They aren’t 40 plus storey build to rent monstrosities owned by private developers that will have a negative impact on Croydon after all…
Nicola Townsend was happy to twice write planning recommendations on a development that failed an extensive list of policies (well into double figures) – including mandatory policy. She refused to respond to freedom of information requests for a year and a half on basic questions such as the height of the development and only doing so on the threat of legal action from the Information Commissioner. The Council was forced to apologise for her unlawfully withholding documents which proved my privacy would have breached. Once again it fell to Inside Croydon to hold the planning department to account.
https://insidecroydon.com/2023/01/17/home-owners-victory-after-four-year-battle-with-planners/
And what is our illustrious Director of Planning and Regeneration, Heather Cheesbrough doing for her six-figure tax-payer-funded salary while this goes on? She’s writing her speaker bio for the Fresh Perspectives Develop Croydon Conference. Never the most articulate of public servants, she writes:
“specialises in design and place making ensuring (sic) the delivery of successful places through collaborative working…….. and has been facilitating the growth and regeneration of the borough through enhancing connectivity, exploring how increased density can create more sustainable and attractive places and how new working patterns, lifestyles and technological innovations will influence our built environment”
I had to put this meaningless word salad to AI to translate it: “I don’t know know what I’m doing so I put up empty tower blocks everywhere and my team is too gormless to challenge me”.
Heather Cheesbrough will have cost Croydon Taxpayers in the region of a million pounds in salary and benefits during her disastrous time here – and that’s before we count all the legal costs incurred.
Croydon does need fresh perspectives in planning – so she (and Townsend) should go instead of fiddling while Croydon burns.
Is the Fresh Perspectives gig still going on? Is it all council-funded?
Probably funded by developers. Apparently they are celebrating “15 years’ of the town’s regeneration”. Odd given the town has degenerated and was bankrupted when Negrini and Negroni-appointed Cheesbrough took office. They are going to be playing with Lego for one of the sessions.
Let’s not forget Heather Cheesbrough, Jo Negrini and Colm Lacey (MD of Brick by Brick) went to the South of France for a jolly at a cost of 20k all the while accumulating the debts that eventually bankrupted the Council. We’ll be paying for increased Council Tax and suffering massive cuts to services for decades to come. And despite her woeful performance, she still shamelessly promotes herself and claims her six-figure salary.
Ah yes. Their annual tax-payer funded trips to Cannes.
The estate agent and business organisation which was at the centre of those jollies is still at the heart of the council’s property transactions.