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
Mayor Jason Perry’s council has been accused of yet another broken promise, and of wasting hundreds of thousands of pounds of tax-payers’ money, this time after rejecting a planning application for seven affordable homes in Upper Norwood, in a scheme that was instigated by… Croydon Council.
One ward councillor has described Croydon planners’ decision to reject the planning application from the Crystal Palace Community Land Trust after five years’ painstaking work as “a kick in the teeth”.
Another Katharine Street source has described the council’s decision to reject the application as the latest “example of how the planning department is out of control”.
Claire Bonham, the Liberal Democrat councillor for Crystal Palace and Upper Norwood, says that the planning rejection breaks a pledge made by the Mayor earlier this year to increase affordable housing in the borough.
Crystal Palace Community Land Trust had won a council-run bidding process to develop a small infill site on The Lawns, just south of Beulah Hill, after the council’s own developers, Brick by Brick, rejected the opportunity.
The Trust is made up of local volunteers dedicated to providing affordable local housing and helping to build community resilience.
The project has had support, and promises of significant grant funding, from the Greater London Authority. The site is on land leased from Croydon Council. 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 council planning department then sat on the Trust’s application for more than a year, before issuing its rejection notice last month.
“This is deeply disappointing news,” Bonham said.
Demanding answers: Councillor Claire Bonham at The Lawns
“SE19 is one of the most unaffordable parts of the borough, so this housing was desperately needed – it’s such a kick in the teeth to the many local volunteers from the CLT who have spent hundreds of hours of their own time on this.
“The council has many questions to answer, especially after years of community engagement and close cooperation on the project from the council’s own planning department.
“I have challenged the Mayor Perry’s deputy to explain why, just five months after pledging to provide more affordable housing, the council has broken that pledge.”
Councillor Bonham wants Mayor Perry to meet with members of the Trust, support the application and “do everything they can to get this vital community project over the line”.
The CLT says that it intends to appeal against the council planners’ decision. “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.”
Read more: Planning battle over The Lawns after council official’s threats
Read more: Another Croydon scandal: the £3k per month high-rise slums
Read more: Brick by Brick residents tell Mayor Perry: ‘We’ve had enough’
Read more: How myth of shared ownership has made housing crisis worse
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Andrew Pelling had the right idea when he said he was going to sack Heather Cheesbrough. Croydon’s planning department has been a joke since she arrived and she’s running rings around Perry. She should do the right thing and resign. Oh – she did resign and then decided to stay. The irony – she can’t even plan her own career.
Didn’t Cheesbrough make a complaint against Pelling because he said she should be sacked?
I’m surprised that someone with such astonishing hubris (matched only by her incompetence) would be so brittle. It was hare-brained planning schemes that bankrupted Croydon Council all neatly facilitated by Cheesbrough. She single-handedly wrecked trust in the planning department and its reputation. Doesn’t seem to like hearing the truth.
Andrew Pelling was quite wrong to simply call for Cheesbrough to be sacked. He should have said that if elected, he would ask that allegations about her qualifications and conduct and competence to be independently investigated and considered by an impartial senior manager at a disciplinary hearing. And if they were found to be true, she should then be sacked.
That piss-poor Perry, elected on the back of all the complaints about the council’s Planning decisions hasn’t bothered to do anything about this points to his stupidity / incompetence / duplicity / cynicism / hypocrisy. Instead he’s conveniently heaped all the blame on Labour. Maybe he’s relying on her help to get his dodgy Polaska Purley Pool scheme built
Heather Cheesbrough allowed:
Silverleaf Developments to use a back-dated letter to give notice on a planning application that included my land (unlawful).
Claimed that documents which showed her team knew the development failed policy, breached privacy, was over-development and harmful related to the pre-app. They didn’t – the dates showed they related the actual planning application.
Claimed that the design had been revised sufficiently to mitigate the above which the Council later confirmed was not the case at all.
Claimed that it was okay to waive mandatory policy as planning was not a ‘box-ticking’ exercise.
Claimed that she was unaware that some of Silverleaf’s diagrams were misleading in order to avoid showing the real impact on neighbouring properties – when in fact it has been brought to her and her team’s attention multiple times, raised in residents’ objections, included in a formal complaint and in the planning committee statement. And her team still cut and pasted diagrams they knew to be inaccurate in their planning report.
Ignored requests from residents to find out the height of the proposed development, for over a year and half and only then when forced to do so under threat of court action from the Information Commissioner.
Withheld visualisations from the committee and unlawfully from a FOI request, that showed the development breached privacy. The Council apologised for the unlawful withholding of the documents. She did nothing when Ross Gentry told the committee, as fact, that privacy was protected when he was in possession of those visualisations and for which the Council had to clarify that it was just his ‘opinion’.
This is just some of what happened and on just one development. Perry and Kerswell are aware of the above.
Let’s hope the next Mayor does hold an independent investigation. I and others will happily provide our dossiers of evidence.
She has a Boris-Johnson-like relationship with the truth.
Agree about the complaint but Ms Mustafa was in charge for quite a bit of that time with Ms Cheesebrough ably assisting and covering Building Control.
Yep Heather lets not repeat all those shenanigans brought to your gullible departments attention other than to say no action as yet and both properties a disaster zone.