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
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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