STEVE WHITESIDE has compiled dossiers of evidence that show that nothing much has changed in the council planning department since 2022. In some cases, for the residents living next to some developments that have gone ahead, things have actually got worse
Not as approved: 12 The Ridgeway in Sanderstead has planning approval. Just not for this building
The developer behind Aveline Apartments, at 12 The Ridge Way in Sanderstead, has appealed against the council’s refusal of its retrospective planning application (23/01763/FUL).
The appeal matters because the refusal is being used as election messaging from Croydon Conservatives. In a recent Facebook post, Croydon South MP Chris Philp listed The Ridge Way among “recent planning victories”, praising Mayor Jason Perry and Conservative councillors for “protecting our local neighbourhoods” by refusing “inappropriate applications”.
An appeal, though, is not won on Facebook. It is won on the record that goes before the Planning Inspector — and 12 The Ridge Way is a case where the record has been contested for years.
What the appeal is really about
The appellant’s Statement of Case tries to make this a simple story of an honest discovery: the approved drawings didn’t reflect the site properly, the land slopes away from the road more steeply than first thought and that “fundamental discrepancy” explains why the scheme ended up different to what was approved.
The appellant leans heavily on a “fallback” argument (the 2019 permission is said to remain extant) and adds a costs warning: councillors, it argues, acted unreasonably by not leaning on conditions to make the scheme acceptable.
The tone is also telling. The Statement of Case notes that 19 dwellings were consulted but 220 objections were received and suggests this “points to a co-ordinated campaign”, while reserving the right to seek an award of costs against the council. That rhetoric is a reminder that the appeal will be fought on documents and evidence, not volume of objections.
This is straight out of the private developers’ playbook: blame the drawings, lean on fallback, propose conditions and portray objections as excessive or coordinated. The problem is that Croydon’s own internal correspondence — disclosed through Freedom of Information requests — doesn’t sit comfortably with the later public fallback storyline.
The council’s own emails: ‘There is no permission for the development’
In January 2022, after a meeting involving senior council officials, Croydon’s case officer emailed the developer that a full retrospective application was required because of the discrepancy between the approved streetscene and context drawings and what they had actually built on the site.
The developers’ friend: Jason Perry owns a business supplying plastic building materials
The council planning official wrote: “As a consequence of this, there is no permission for the development.”
In plain English, that’s Croydon telling the developer: stop trying to tweak a live permission. You need a new, full planning application to retain what has been built, and you proceed at your own risk.
It is difficult to reconcile that with the later comfort blanket that a 2019 fallback permission exists and should be given weight.
To explain: in planning jargon, a fallback is a kind of “Plan B”. With fallback, the applicant argues that if their current, preferred planning application is refused, they have a lawful right to carry out an alternative development on the same site, based on previous approved permissions.
This matters because fallback isn’t a neutral concept. It can tilt the planning balance by suggesting refusal is futile (“They’ll just build the other scheme”), or by lowering scrutiny (“It’s better than the fallback”). If the fallback baseline is shaky, the entire balance is skewed — and Croydon’s own emails suggest it is.
Planning history: the chapter councillors were told had ‘no bearing’
A second uncomfortable point is how councillors were directed to treat the site’s planning history. The pre-committee addendum told members that a withdrawn application (21/03404/CONR) “does not have any bearing” on the current assessment because it was withdrawn.
But “withdrawn” does not automatically mean irrelevant. That application generated correspondence and objections about the same live issues vis-a-vis materials, construction approach, accuracy of drawings, drainage, and whether what was being built could ever match what had been approved. But the addendum’s categorical “no bearing” line invited planning committee members to discount it entirely.
After the committee refused permission, the post-committee addendum didn’t correct that advice. It simply noted the withdrawn application had been “referenced” and therefore formed part of the information available.
That’s not a correction. It’s the council saying, “We mentioned it”, without acknowledging that councillors were told to treat it as having no bearing.
Committee: how ‘intentional unauthorised development’ was side-lined
This is where the “regularise it” culture becomes political.
During the committee meeting, Michael Neal, the South Croydon councillor who chairs the planning committee, asked whether the developers’ conduct and non-compliance with the earlier permission could form part of the decision-making. The council’s head of development management, Nicola Townsend, said that the application must be judged against current policy and the council “can’t take into account previous performance” of the applicant when determining an application.
Government guidelines: according to this ministerial statement, Croydon’s planning department has been ignoring the law on intentional unauthorised development for a decade
That advice matters. National policy has long recognised that intentional unauthorised development can be a material consideration carrying weight in the planning balance. That’s not “punishment”. It’s about incentives, fairness and public confidence: whether a developer should benefit from building first and arguing later, particularly where the consequences fall on neighbours and the community.
That exchange helped to strip intentional unauthorised development out of the committee’s reasons and out of the post-committee paper trail. The post-committee addendum then fell back on the unhelpful line that, “It is not an offence to apply for retrospective planning permission”.
The end result is that one of the few issues that speaks directly to public trust — the applicant’s deliberate approach to get round planning controls — was treated as a non-issue.
What I tried to do before the Decision Notice was issued
It’s important to say this was not an after-the-event campaign.
Before the committee met on October 15 last year, I emailed all committee members and reserves with a structured objection. It raised the “no permission/no fallback” correspondence, the legal relevance of inaccurate contextual drawings and demolition and implementation, highway safety beyond parking numbers, the evidence gap around sustainable drainage systems, or SuDS, in a Critical Drainage Area and the need to attach adverse weight to intentional unauthorised development.
Stooge: planning committee chair Michael Neal
After the committee meeting, but before any Decision Notice could be issued, I wrote repeatedly to Nicola Townsend, the council’s legal department and Councillor Neal, among others, asking them to correct specific contradictions and omissions and to strengthen the council’s refusal record, rather than leaving key matters to conditions or ignoring them because they hadn’t been debated in the room.
I tried, repeatedly, to get Croydon to stop treating missing or contested evidence as something to be “conditioned” later, and to avoid issuing a Decision Notice on a significantly incomplete record.
There was no reply.
Accessibility: the ‘quote’ that wasn’t a quote
Accessibility is where the paperwork most obviously didn’t match the confidence of the presentation. Councillors were told, as a statement of fact, that the scheme included one wheelchair-accessible flat and one “accessible/adaptable” flat. The official’s report even presented building control input as a reassuring “quote”.
But the full building control comments disclosed under FoI were more cautionary, highlighting significant shortfalls against the published guidance and warning that step-free access to upper floors cannot be assumed without a lift.
Croydon planners’ fallback position: from the official report to last October’s planning committee. Planning officials argued that by demolishing the family home that was on the site, the developers had ‘implemented’ their 2019 permission
At the same time, residents pointed to contradictions between the “as-built” plan set and the accessibility drawings the council recommended for approval — a recipe for conditions that are unclear and hard to enforce.
Highways and SuDS: conditions used to paper over missing evidence
Residents’ concerns on highways were never just “how many spaces”. They were about safe access: visibility, manoeuvring, swept paths and real-world usability. Yet the report and presentation admitted basic evidence defects, while still trying to condition past the problem.
On drainage, the site is described as being within a Critical Drainage Area, but FoI responses indicate the council held no soakaway or infiltration test results and no evidence of installation of important SuDS features. Croydon said they held key drainage documents but refused disclosure on “confidentiality” grounds. That is exactly the kind of “passive oversight” that leaves residents sceptical: the council relies on documents the public cannot see, and then proposes conditions to cover what it cannot evidence.
Jason Perry’s own words: ‘regularise later’ and ‘don’t punish’
In April 2020 — before he became Mayor — Jason Perry wrote to me that it is “often common practice” for developers to build out and adapt schemes “in contravention”, that enforcement can be “at best weak”, and that the “tendency tends to be to regularise the situation with a retrospective planning application”.
Perry added: “Such retrospective applications must be judged on their merits and not used to ‘punish’ the developer.”
The Ridge Way case is a live test of whether Croydon’s current leadership is serious about tackling the “regularise later” culture it previously criticised. Or whether it still defaults to passive oversight and conditions, leaving residents to do the scrutiny.
Inside Croydon has previously reported on Perry’s links to the building supply industry while holding roles connected with planning. Throughout his time as Croydon Mayor, on a salary which is now £86,000 per year, Perry has remained as a director of Carlton Building Plastics Ltd.
What happens after the appeal
Finally, there is a reality that residents know only too well: even if the Planning Inspector dismisses the developers’ appeal and the refusal stands, that does not magically fix what has already been built. The next test becomes enforcement and compliance — where Croydon’s track record would leave residents sceptical that anything is likely to happen quickly, if at all.
In Croydon, “refused” too often becomes “parked”.
The appeal will run its course. But the bigger question this case leaves hanging is whether Croydon’s planning system is a regulator or a spectator — and whether residents get transparency before the concrete sets.
Read more: Council delays and lack of enforcement cause residents misery
Read more: Stink from Arkwright Road flats smells of council failures
Read more: Home owner’s victory after four-year battle with planners
Read more: Planners’ unconditional love for developers is unchanged
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ROTTEN BOROUGH AWARDS: In January 2026, Croydon was named among the country’s rottenest boroughs for an EIGHTH time in nine years, in Private Eye magazine’s annual round-up of civic cock-ups
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Isn’t the bigger point here that planning in Croydon South is being used as a political football with residents and developers left in the middle.
So called “planning victories” are sometimes inappropriate or unwanted new build but other times they are modest developments making use of some spare land .
Although the intensification is minimal the responses via Resident Association chat groups is vitriolic and out of proportion the project. I think we neither need to be preconditioned to object not supine in our response to invasive developments. What I hope for is a happy landing place between modest growth of homes in Croydon South and the sense of every plot being up for redevelopment radically altering the character of the place.
I think it is time for craven headline grabbers like Philp and Perry to stop politicising people’s homes and neighbourhoods in order to activate their voting base. We need good regulation and balanced responses from professional planners. There is after all a need for more homes in London and it seems fair the Croydon South contributes to that.
I am a candidate for Labour in Sanderstead but this is a personal view.
Heather Cheesborough claimed not to know that Silverleaf Developments Ltd had submitted drawings that were inaccurate (presumably to minimise the impact a block of flats just over 7 metres from my house and utilising my land would have). This was despite it being brought to the planning department’s attention and directly to her attention multiple times. Their drawings didn’t reflect the site properly either. Not did the planners’ aerial view in which they used an old image of the site before my house was built to mislead the Committee about the size of the available plot. And they withheld documents unlawfully. And they lied to the Planning Committee. And they allowed the developer to use a backdated letter to serve notice. And they accepted the developer’s claim that light studies had been conducted with no impact on residents when no study had been completed. And and and.
https://insidecroydon.com/2023/01/17/home-owners-victory-after-four-year-battle-with-planners/
This interpretation relies heavily on a single contested case and selective correspondence.
Planning in Croydon will never advance when the likes of Sean Fitzsimons is given a seat on the committee. He doesn’t have the intellectual bandwidth – this is the former chair of the Scrutiny Committee of a council which because of a lack of scrutiny, drove itself off a financial cliff.
It really is not. Steve Whiteside has been logging similar cases to this right across the borough, advising residents’ associations and residents when they have objected or challenged the ill-considered and inept decisions of the planning department, through the Cheesbrough era through to today.
You talk about intellectual lightweights? Michael Neal’s sole function as chair of the planning committee is to do what Jason Perry requires, controlled at meetings by his minder Ian Parker.
SPD2 may have gone, but the fuckwittery remains.