How long before Westminster city council begins to reject applications to convert offices to flats? A report this week from agent H2SO may tilt the balance of opinion in favour of the council. There is genuine worry about lost jobs and the lights going out in busy offices. There are worries about the impact of dark-windowed flats owned by absent foreigners.
About a month ago I listened to Westminster’s independent-minded planning chief, Rosemarie MacQueen, give her views on the topic. She said that “there was a need to look after locals”, and that “moving from offices to residential may have a very big impact”. And she added that the council was “moving towards a local plan”.
In that day’s Evening Standard, she said: “The number of planning applications and interest in changing offices to residential has necessitated a review of our approach. In particular, we need to protect the small-scale, low-value building stock that is the optimum home to SMEs but also, unfortunately, is the kind of building that lends itself to conversion to residential use.”
H2SO says that 603,000 sq ft of office space was converted to residential in 2011 – about twice the annual total over the previous decade. Partner Paul Smith says: “There is a substantial raft of buildings which have been publicly earmarked for conversion but have not yet entered the planning process.” Some advice for those whose applications are floating towards submission: paddle faster.
Offshoring in deep water
Back to corporate financial responsibility, a concept talked of here in June, when comedian Jimmy Carr was outed for offshoring his assets. A reminder: “The British offshore empire flourishes. Constructing ‘vehicles’ out of paper in this or that sunny or shady spot is routine and barely remarked upon.” Well, it’s being remarked upon more and more. This week the Guardian has done an awful lot of remarking.
The question for anyone “holding” immovable real estate offshore is this: is it likely that, sooner or later, the government of the day will invent an onshore tax that is impossible to avoid? Or set up barriers at the Land Registry restricting title to those who do pay tax? What is known is that a slow rage is building against businesses that avoid tax from individuals who can’t.
Letter from Maidstone
The following story was not meant to be funny. Indeed, you don’t know whether to laugh or cry. It comes from a council-backed free-sheet in a town of 120,000 in the South East. A 612-page “integrated transport strategy” designed to underpin a planning policy requiring the council to come up with 10,000 new homes and 10,000 new jobs was produced at Lord knows what cost.
Last week the report, which predicts a 41% increase in traffic by 2026, was unanimously rejected by the council as being “unworkable” and “not fit for purpose”. The chairman of the committee rejecting the report said there was “no evidence” the town needed 10,000 more homes, saying they should be dispersed into “more rural areas”.
The leader of the county council backed the local council, calling the plan “a developer’s charter”. Elsewhere in the paper comes heartwarming news of a developer paying the £100,000 cost of transferring a colony of great crested newts away from the site of a new industrial park. Note to planning minister Nick Boles: welcome to the real world, in Tory Maidstone, in Tory Kent.
A substantial pat on the back
Frogmore chairman Paul White can clearly pick ’em. Five years ago he started sponsoring triathlete Alistair Brownlee, who won gold at London 2012. The 24-year-old – who looks more like 18 – turned up at a Frogmore event in Cavendish Square on Monday night to pick up more gold: a cheque for £10,000 from Frogmore. Was this bonus part of the sponsorship agreement, which has come to an end? “No,” said White. “You can’t just pat him on the back and say ‘well done’, can you?”
