Councillor Tony Belton’s Latchmere February, 2017, Newsletter (# 93)

1. You will remember that in December, the Planning Applications Committee (PAC) decided to approve the 14-storey development at 3 Culvert Road, pictured right. Many local residents objected and I expressed their views in a letter I wrote to London’s Mayor Khan on 11^th January asking him to call in the application (a process where he takes the decision upon himself and can over-ride the PAC decision). So far, I have had no response to the letter, which I have included in full at the end of this email. If you have not yet done so, then writing to the Mayor at mayor@london.gov.uk stating how much you agree with local objectors and with me, might just be the straw on the camel’s back!

2. On Monday, 16th January, I went to the Passenger Transport Liaison Committee, which can, I confess, be amazingly, detailed and boring but not this time! Take note anyone who uses the railway system! Masses of changes are planned for August, 2017, and so if you are a regular train commuter and you plan to go on holiday then I advise you to go in August, because August is going to be planned chaos – and everyone knows how chaotic that could be!
3. The biggest disruptions will be from 5^th-29^th August with the closure of Earlsfield station at peak hours and the total closure of Queenstown Road Rail services through Clapham Junction will be reduced by 25% from 33 trains per peak hour to 25. The plan is to have
   

   British Rail Class 707

   the new, longer British Rail 707 rolling stock on all Windsor lines and to pretty well double capacity by 2018, with much of Waterloo also being modernised in 2018. Here is one of the British Rail Class 707 trains on trial at Clapham Junction.

4. The overall Network Rail £800 million plan is to change the rail network so that 10-carriage trains can run on all lines in and out of Waterloo by January, 2018, hence resolving some of the massive capacity problems that we have on all commuter trains. However, to do this, platforms 1-9 at Waterloo have to be extended, something which cannot be done given the geography of the platforms without major engineering work, including opening platforms 20-24 for regular use. Using those high number platforms means that the main flow of trains will be concentrated on the high number tracks and will be too heavy to allow any to stop at Queenstown Road or at Earlsfield in peak hours.
5. This is all explained in a clip that you can see at https://www.southwesttrains.co.uk/plan-your-journey/planned-improvements/wswupgrade/?dm_i=36D9,DUFD,4HO7T7,1EDMW,1

6. Meanwhile we also learnt that tunnelling is to start in March, ending in September, on the Northern Line extension from Kennington to Battersea Park The estimated 680,000 tons of spoil will be transported by river barge to somewhere in the estuary. It would apparently take 40,000 lorries to transport the spoil.
7. London Underground also announced that the night-time tube service first operated in August, 2016, has already been used by 2.6 million travellers. London Underground are confident that it has stimulated the “night-time” economy but it is not yet clear exactly what the impact has been as far as “other” users are concerned (such as cleaners, caretaking staff, etc.) but there will be passenger surveys in the near future.

8. This month’s Planning Applications Committee meeting was on 17^th There were a number of applications that were of particular interest in North Battersea. The first was the plan to restore Battersea Park to its condition prior to Formula E Racing; the second about a Care Home development at York Court, 313 Battersea Park Road, on the Doddington Estate; and the third a group of applications to build council housing on the Gideon Road estate.

9. The application to restore all areas of the Park was very detailed, but local residents, who have followed this whole process very closely, assured me that the restoration, whilst not perhaps being perfect, is acceptable.
10. The Care Home development is fairly large by the standards of these things, providing 78 care beds and 30 assisted living suites. It also would raise the height of the building by two storeys. I voted against this development as over-large and over-dense, but it was approved.
11. There were also three applications for the development of council housing on the Gideon Road estate in Shaftesbury. The applications were for 18, 4 and 8 homes respectively and the intention is to use them for decanting from the York Gardens estate. I, and my fellow Labour councillors, supported the applications as welcome additions to the Council’s socially rented housing stock, although we certainly had some criticism from current residents. It is hard to please everyone.

12. On 26^th January, I looked in briefly at York Gardens Library, to see the presentation given to some 50-odd interested residents of Inkster and Penge Houses about their re-furbishment. The response was very positive and certainly the plans look pretty good to me. I am told that the intention is to take on board a couple of suggestions made by residents and then to get the work started in late 2017 or early 2018, finishing about 18 months after that.

13. I went to the Battersea Fields Residents Association on 30^th January, having been specifically invited to talk about the Culvert Road development. Although not as dramatically affected by the proposed development as residents of Culvert or Battersea Park Roads, the residents were as concerned as most locals about the traffic, parking and congestion problems that may follow, unless carefully monitored.

14. It was interesting to see last week’s Wandsworth Guardian report about Harris Academy’s improved performance – but then worrying a few days later to hear a BBC TV news report that the “improvement” was mainly a statistical consequence of excluding the worst performing pupils from the school and from the exams. This has been a concern expressed to me by a number of people, including at least a couple of you, who are ex-teachers from the school.
15. I was not very keen on the school’s change from being a local authority school to, in effect, a private school run by the Harris Academy chain on behalf of the local authority. If the good results are “genuine” and maintained for a few years, then I will have to accept that the Academy has done a good job for the school-children of Battersea, but if this is simply a result of “failing” the lowest achieving children, then this will stand as yet another indictment against this Government’s education policies.

16. Many of you expressed concern about my knee replacement and I am pleased to say that it is improving, but is not yet perfect. I can get around without a stick or crutches easily enough but I must say a crutch is a great way to stop the traffic – and to get a seat on the bus!

My Programme for February

1. On 1^st February, there is a full Council Meeting, when we will be discussing elements of Wandsworth’s budget. Given the scale of Government’s cuts to our rate support grant, it will not be a very comfortable occasion, to say the least.
2. The day after, 2^nd February, I will be standing in again for the Labour Leader at a Let’s Talk Meeting in St. Anne’s Church, on St. Anne’s Hill.
3. On 9^th February, I will be going to an informal party with the Kambala Estate residents.
4. At 10.30 on 10^th February, I will be at Maurice Johnson’s funeral at Christchurch on Battersea Park Road. I am sure that many of you will remember Maurice, here pictured with his daughter, Laura and being invested as an Honorary Alderman by Mayor Thom. Maurice was a Latchmere councillor from 1990-2010, and a well-known personality across the Borough. You can see an obituary I wrote about Maurice at https://tonybelton.wordpress.com/
5. I have a Community Services Committee (Community Services is almost anything that is not housing or education, from parks to libraries, swimming baths to refuse collection, parks to sewers) on the 16^th February and the Planning Applications Committee on the 23^rd.
6. On the 22^nd, there will be a Finance and Corporate Resources Committee, when it is my guess that the Council will announce next year’s Council Tax, which I suspect will be an increase of just under 2%.

Do you know?

Last month I asked you to pose a Battersea- related question that I cannot answer and which I will pose to everyone else, next month. To be honest that didn’t ring a bell with many of you and not one asked anything that I didn’t know. Ian, however, asked, “Our canine friend here, in his original form, caused a cataclysmic event in the past. Firstly, who is the fellow, where is he situated? Also, what was that cataclysmic event?”

I will answer that next month, but meanwhile how many of you know? Send me your answers.

Appendix 1 See the item on Culvert Road development. My letter to the Mayor read:-

“I am writing to you to ask that you call in, and reject, Wandsworth Planning Application, 2016/4188, relating to 3 Culvert Road, SW11 4ND.

“I am a councillor for the relevant Latchmere ward and also a member of the Borough’s Planning Applications Committee, which considered this proposal on 14th December. Unfortunately, I was not able to be there as I was in hospital recovering from an operation. However, I would ask you to take note of the points already made by my constituent Mr. Paul Forster, which I will not repeat but fully support, and the following comments of mine. This letter is, by the way, endorsed by my fellow ward councillors, Simon Hogg and Wendy Speck.

“First of all, I fully acknowledge the pressures on you, as Mayor, and each and every one of the London Boroughs to provide more and more housing units across the capital. I know from working with you, as fellow Wandsworth councillors, that this a very important objective of yours, indeed it is an almost over-whelming priority for both you and for London. However, this is such a small site (0.132 hectares or about 15% of a football pitch) that even at the height and density proposed the total number of units is only 39. Given that the Council’s target over the 2015-30 timescale is to add 25,860 units and that 33,538 new homes are already in the pipeline, it would seem a pity to break planning guidelines and offend local residents for such a minor addition.

“As recently as March 2016 Wandsworth produced its Site Specific Allocations Document listing many potential housing sites in the Borough. This site was not included and was not considered to be a contributor to the housing targets, because it was then part of the Battersea Technology College school site. The site is indeed so far from critical to reaching the Council’s housing targets that it has never even been included in the plans.

“The change factor has been the change in the school status from being a state school to being part of the Harris Academy chain, at which point motivations changed and squeezing as much capital value as possible out of the site became the prime motivator. Hence a site, which had perhaps only a limited value as a schoolkeeper’s house became worth a great deal more as the site for the development of high quality residential units.

“Immediate neighbours who had been living next to a small, under-used, over-grown site might have expected a future development on the scale of, say, Merryfield Court (as referenced in Mr. Forster’s letter). But instead they have found themselves faced with the prospect of a dominating 14 storey block. Unsurprisingly of 217 comments from neighbours and interested parties, 205 have objected and several petitions have been collected against the proposal. The Mayor will know, as indeed will planners, just how significant it is to get that many objections from an area dominated by social and private tenants as opposed to owner occupiers. The proposal is massively unpopular in the immediate neighbourhood.

“Secondly, the proportion of affordable housing is possibly even more important to you than the raw number of housing units. At barely 20%, with only 8 of 39 units, being affordable, this hardly scratches the surface of acceptability. Worse they are all intermediate units and not rental units, so that the expected income of aspirants to even a one-bed flat is £46,000 p.a. with the remaining units affordable to applicants with gross incomes up to the GLA limit of £90,000 p.a. This surely exposes the myth of these units being affordable for the average Londoner or Wandsworth resident.

“Thirdly, the “benefits justification” for granting this permission is totally inadequate. The largest element of the justification appears to be the provision of sports facilities to Harris Academy. This, of course, is good news for the pupils of the Academy (and goes someway to explaining the very small number of residents supporting the proposal) but in terms of capital value the development benefits a private school, even one which educates state funded pupils. The benefit does not accrue in any way to the public as a capital asset.

“So Wandsworth’s own Conservation Advisory Committee said on 14th November 2016, when considering the impact of the planned development on the Latchmere Estate and Battersea Park Conservation Areas, “there is insufficient justification for a building of this height, which will cause harm to the setting (of these two conservation areas)”. The Committee went on to say that “public benefit has been identified BUT if the building proposed is the wrong fit for the site then these public benefits should be seen as irrelevant in terms of justification”.

“Fourth, the 22 storey Castlemaine block appears to be adopted by Wandsworth planners as the benchmark for the area and hence justifying the 14 storeys proposed for 3 Culvert Road. As a local councillor, I know that the popular view in the area would very much be that Castlemaine was an aberration of the 1960’s tower block craze. It has blighted, rather than enhanced, the area and definitely should not be used as a benchmark of anything other than what modern developments should try and avoid.

“Finally, I would briefly re-iterate Mr. Forster’s primary points: –

• Wandsworth Council policy setting the site in an area where tall buildings of five stories or higher are inappropriate
• re the impact on the residents of 2-32 Culvert Road, of Merryfield Court and of Battersea Park Road
• density levels between two and three times greater than the London plan, i.e. 765 hrph (habitable rooms per hectare) as opposed to 200-450.

Yours sincerely,

Tony Belton, Wandsworth Labour councillor and Planning speaker

I hope that you give my letter and Mr. Forster’s objections due consideration.