Another week, another tale that does further reputational damage to the UK’s once-revered planning system. Confusion, it seems, has replaced certainty, with officials and politicians plainly poles apart. Localism, it ain’t.
As I predicted here last week, the London mayor’s instruction that the skate park beneath the Southbank Centre, SE1, should not be moved has, for now at least, scuppered a £150m redevelopment of this cultural hub.
The SBC is delaying its application for three months to allow further discussions to happen. It needs to rework funding models, warning that the case for closing down the project is “compelling” and describing the discussions ahead as nothing less than a “last ditch revival attempt”. Without moving the skate park from the prime site fronting the Thames, it argues, it cannot secure the funding it needs. It would be tragic if the whole project were no longer viable. It would be perverse if, as a result of discussions with government, the mayor’s office and various arts bodies, public subsidy had to replace private funding to make it work.
Less significant perhaps, but this week also saw Westminster council reject an application by publisher Condé Nast and the organisers of the London Real Estate Forum to stage events in Berkeley Square, W1, in the summer. The Glamour Awards have been run on the site without planning permission for a number of years, though permission was granted for both events 12 months ago.
With the council firmly behind the events, and Boris Johnson slated to speak at the opening of LREF in June, the application was expected to go through without objection. Clearly, no one told Westminster’s planning committee that; it was rejected unanimously. Within hours a revised application was in with every indication that its approval would be expedited. Presumably that will be the case second time around. Left arm, meanwhile, time to get acquainted with right arm.
Meanwhile, rumours continue to swirl that ministers have been going against the advice of civil servants when it comes to calling in major schemes in the capital. No wonder the Lib Dems are mooting reform.
The disconnect between the appointed and the elected appears to be widening. At the same time, regional and national government seems to pay little heed to the views of local authorities. All of this is contributing to a far less certain planning environment. And while the word “local” may crop up no fewer than 364 times in the National Planning Policy Framework, the planning environment feels distinctly less than localist today.
¦ Credit to ministers for taking on board recent Estates Gazette research that showed there were more than 2,250 applications for a change of use from office to residential in the first six months since a change in policy granted permission. And a ticking off for those local authorities which, it appears, are seeking to get around being refused exemptions from the policy. Using Article 4 directions to remove office-to-residential permitted development rights is hardly entering into the spirit of this worthwhile initiative. Nor for that matter is unlawfully asking for section 106 financial contributions.
¦ The speaker line-up for October’s first MIPIM UK is shaping up nicely. Housing minister Kris Hopkins, Derwent London’s John Burns and Berkeley Group chairman Tony Pidgley are just some of the stellar names who will step onto the London Olympia stage. And with an advisory committee meeting over the coming months, let me know who and what topics you would like to see.
¦ With fears of an overheating market by price and a deepening crisis in terms of provision, I am unsure whether I was more heartened or saddened by this Estates Gazette view of housing policy in 1919: “Each week makes it clearer that the government’s housing policy contains the seeds of its own dissolution,” we opined. It could have been written yesterday.
Damian.Wild@estatesgazette.com
