Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!
Wards Corner temporary setback
Grainger plan voted through.
Five-four, party lines.
Wish I'd bet my house on it, then I could afford to leave. Don't want to live here any more if those are the people who have power over me.
Tags for Forum Posts: seven sisters, ward's corner
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Candy on
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The real reason that the Labour Councillors voted this through was because they were told to. The GLA task-force has ordered for this to happen, so happen it must, even though it is total folly. The council cannot be trusted to deal with post riot Tottenham, so Boris must do it for them.
I would love to know exactly how they made our local councilors risk alienation from their neighbours and community by voting for Grainger and I am a little taken aback that that they chose the party over us. But then if you sign your life away to a political party, then this is what you do. We have seen over and over again what happens if you attempt to have something called a principal. And it is not a pretty sight seeing politicians laying into their own party members.
But what I really think is that the planning committee have made a huge mistake backing Grainger, who obviously do not relish this project any more that we relish having it done to us. They appear to have a viability problem, a huge risk to the tube and a problem with their shareholders if they put their profits at risk with this foolish venture. They have very little track record of development, with only Hornsey baths behind them. They are a letting company, not a development company.
So I wonder when they will start to think that a compromise might a better solution. Well, if they do, we are here to suggest it. Well, to give Grainger credit, they do not need us to tell them what to do. All that is needed is a solution that is fair to those affected and a much loved building saved and used.
It was a gruesome sight at Mondays planning meeting, watching those Councillors pretend to have concern and care for the poor victims of all this. At other times it was laughable. But curiously a lot of us feel that there is more hope of a solution, now the full folly of all this has been revealed.
I just hope that I am not being too optimistic.
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Permalink Reply by sphamilton on
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I wasn't at this meeting, so many thanks for the accountsgiven here. As a local resident, I am particularly appalled that this plan has been forced through without any requirement to provide affordable housing.
I'd add that I also don't find the area intimidating: I'm fortysomething, female, and have used the area at all hours of the day and night for years, coming and going from the tube or shops. It's busy, and lots of people hang around, but (possibly due to the absence of a pub within a couple of hundred yards' radius) I've yet to experience any aggression or intimidation.
Re: models of regeneration - what's going on in Brixton Market at the moment might also be a useful comparison. If you want to bring more well-heeled people into the area, you can do it just as well (or better) with interesting small businesses as with yet another branch of Starbucks and Next.
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INteresting becasuse Graingers own COM RES poll also said that local people didn't find the are crime ridden. Their own poll disproved the arguments made to back th scheme.
But that's not the picture they painted in their media biefing. They just made up a story.
The problem is we can't trust our own councillors. What do we do? I am dealing with them in Bruce Grove! and its a quandry!
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Permalink Reply by Alan Stanton on
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Once, when I sat on a jury, one of the defence barristers summed-up the prosecution case as: "it must have been". That we'd heard not sufficient evidence, but simply a possible scenario for events.
The allegation that Boris Johnson, the GLA, or the Labour Party "told" or "ordered" Planning Committee members what to do is not even remotely likely. For one thing members of the Planning Committee cannot legally be "whipped". Ordering them would also be unworkable.
Take, for example, Cllr Stuart McNamara who asked a number of challenging questions to Grainger's reps. I know him reasonably well and he's not someone to obey such an order. (I'd guess he'd suggest politely where the instructor could stick their instruction.)
If you need a likely "It must have been" explanation, then can I suggest an alternative. That those who support the Grainger scheme - or at minimum did not see sufficient planning grounds for turning it down - were, just like you, trying genuinely to reach a fair judgement based on facts and the views presented by all sides.
(Tottenham Hale ward councillor)
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in reply to Alan Stanton, I am not suggesting they were literally told to vote the Grainger plan through. I think you know that there is no need to do that. And I am sure that you also know that these things are unsaid, but the unsaid exerts power. And if you want to remain a labour party councillor them you have to follow the party line. We all knew that this plan was going to be voted through, so I cannot believe that those on the committee did not know. Local councillors were talking about this fact long before the meeting, so how did they know?
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You wrote, Candy, that: "The real reason that the Labour Councillors voted this through was because they were told to. The GLA task-force has ordered for this to happen, so happen it must, even though it is total folly." Okay, I accept that you didn't mean this literally. It was something "unsaid".
I'm not quoting this to score a point, but because you've taken the trouble to reply and challenged me to respond. But I'm genuinely finding it difficult to say something which I haven't already said.
You are right that voting against the party whip can lead to a councillor being deselected. But not on planning decisions. Because they are not and cannot be whipped. So when Cllr Joanna Christophides voted against Grainger's second application, she didn't "defy" the whip; or Boris; or anyone else. She made her own judgement. Presumably at that time, a judgement you respected. I certainly did.
I can't tell you what Joanna thought this time because I didn't discuss the application with her. In fact before the planning committee I didn't discuss it with any of the committee members. Cllr Stuart McNamara made it clear he wouldn't even have an informal conversation about the application. Reg Rice my fellow Tottenham Hale councillor is scrupulous about leaving meetings when particular planning issues come up. And the whips would no more try "leaning on" Reg than they would on Stuart.
You've made it clear you think this decision was utterly wrong. You have every right to hold the view that councillors voting for the Grainger proposal made an error of judgement. But, however misguided you think they were, please consider the possibility that they each reached their decision based on the facts and views presented to them, and on planning criteria. Not on some inducement or threat - stated or unstated.
(Tottenham Hale ward councillor)
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Permalink Reply by William Booth on
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But planning criteria and facts and views presented to councillors when taken together constitute precisely an "inducement or threat". It's a political inducement. The developers couch their bids in terms that allow councillors to gain political capital out of them and nobody scrutinises either end of the conversation. It's such a pervasive modus operandi now that it doesn't need to be actively collusive. Everyone just does it; it's a mode of speech and of thinking. It's a colossal dereliction of duty by public servants and they don't even get that they are doing it.
You don't need to send the heavies round or slip anyone brown envelopes any more like you did forty or fifty years ago. There are enough councillors who have grown up with the uncontested idea that 'development' is an intrinsically good thing and that we should all be thoroughly grateful that kind, generous folk like Graingers want to 'invest' their 'hard-earned' money in our area.
All you need to do is show the decision-makers some crap CGI of how you want them to imagine the area in ten years time and they can't get pen to paper fast enough.* Never mind concerns about our heaving infrastructure and services, that's nothing to do with planning apparently. Nor is grotesquely inappropriate architecture - god forbid councillors intervening on aesthetic matters!
First, the "inducement". Graingers is a particularly clear example of this, St. Ann's hospital site may yet prove to be similar. The points raised in favour of the bid by Grainger are complete and utter PR guff:
- Deliver £65million of investment into Tottenham and Seven Sisters - much like the second point below, this is a great political inducement to councillors. They can dine out for years on a meaningless announcement like this, but there are never costings, brass tacks, detailed analysis of the end-beneficiaries of this 'investment'. It's snake oil until we see that sort of close examination.
- Generate £11million of new spend in local shops every year and support over 600 new jobs over the next 5 years - a much more certain way for the council to ensure new local jobs is to, you know, actually employ local workers instead of farming the contracts out. Before we hear the usual argument about there being no public appetite for councils directly employing people, the glass house of the highly-paid and bloated council bureaucracy should probably have a stone-throwing moratorium. Nonetheless, the 'inducement' here is the political gift of being able to announce fictional future jobs with absolutely no need to go back and check whether they happened, and if they didn't to sue Graingers to the tune of the money they said they would invest. This is a widespread practice and is really a scam, nobody ever checks up on the results of 'development' versus its gaudy promises.
- Bring high street names back to Seven Sisters as well as provide new shops for independent businesses - fake demand for identikit tat, though of course there's no material inducements provided by large corporations. No, that's never happened in local government.
- Provide a new, purpose built, long term home for Seven Sisters Market - they have one, and the council are colluding to take it away under the guise of providing it. Orwellian doublespeak of the finest grade. But here are the inducements again - 'new' SHINY, 'purpose built' SHINY - such lovely words to go on councillors' CVs!
- Create a safe and active public area and a new focal point for the community - it is a pretty safe area as Graingers' own survey revealed. This calumny wasn't challenged by the council who are colluding in the proliferation of the Tottenham-as-basket-case narrative. And if anyone in planning thinks a block of flats for commuters is going to be a focal point for the community they seriously need to think about their life choices.
- Show the world that the regeneration of Tottenham has begun - it is irrelevant whether the world knows or not to us Tottenham folk. Though I'm sure the thought of a few national TV spots or appearances at 'flagship redevelopment' conferences around the world for local councillors couldn't possibly be a subconscious inducement.
Then, the "threat". Without such developments, we are told, we will have a housing crisis. The borough is bursting. Or it is crumbling. Yet the decline in the housing stock of London became sharpest just when the government began to turn to the private sector as the engine of housing growth. It is a devolving of control over the situation. It is what has led to the borough being full of illegal HMOs which are tolerated by the council to the detriment of many neighbourhoods, plugging a gap the council should be responsible for.
The council should be busting a gut to build *and own* top quality social housing with long leases and at the same time using whatever means necessary to get the many empty houses opened up and rented out (buying and refurbishing them and letting them out if necessary). It should be employing people accountably and directly to do these things. Instead it is following the same disastrous road as so many other 'transitional' areas in London and selling itself as a place for fly-by-night commuters, the exact opposite of community-building.
*Some of them go so giddy at the prospect of new flats that they actually buy them at the (cheap) planning stage and then have to live in the awful places! How sad we feel for them when it turns out that these futuristic wonders turn out to be thrown up in a hurry, poorly-integrated or connected, or smelling strongly of stagnant water!?
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Permalink Reply by byl999 on
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Couldn't have put it more eloquently myself. You're spot on, William Booth !!!!!!
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Permalink Reply by Clive Carter on
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The points raised in favour of the bid by Grainger are complete and utter PR guff
Yes. There is evidence of public relations company involvement. For example, on Grainger's home page, there is the claim that they are "securing the future" of housing.
There is nothing remarkable about this empty, meaningless claim. It's a over-used piece of PR phrasing that is employed by councils and developers up and down the country.
The council spent nearly £200,000 of public money with the PR company Lexington, in order to persuade the public that our Charity Alexandra Palace should be sold. In particular, we were assured that this sale would "secure the future" of Alexandra Palace.
Whenever "secure the future" is used, you know that a PR company is employed and alarm bells need to go off. Another classic phrase is "we think the public will understand that [xyz]"
Sometimes when PR companies are engaged, it means that a scheme cannot otherwise stand on its own merits.
Sadly - and wastefully - this council is wedded to PR.
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William, we seem to have shifted from secret orders and instructions issued by Boris Johnson, Claire Kober, the Labour Whips, or someone else, to your new suggested definition of 'inducement' or 'threat'. Which is along the lines that all councillors are gullible idiots who don't even need old-fashioned bribes because they are "induced" to believe by developers' PR. Or by developers' "threats" that without a particular development we will have a housing crisis.
Apart from LibDem councillors of course.
You say: "The Council should be busting a gut to own and build top quality social housing." I agree. And in past decades even Tory Housing Ministers agreed. And were actually proud of building thousands of council homes. But we don't have a Government which agrees; and haven't had for over thirty years.
And we do have a housing crisis.
So what if Graingers planned to make say, 50% of their scheme - or even 100% - social housing? Would you have supported it then?
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Permalink Reply by pamish on
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Nope. Not on that site. And not that appalling design. Not even for 200 new units of social housing, less of course the 40 effective housing units lost.
Simply too much to lose, jobs, housing, heritage, stabilty, culture, original materials. Boom, gone.
And the design really is hideous. It's even uglier than Tescos, and bigger. Note that Grainger does not show mock-ups of its appearance from along the High Road, only corner shots. Imagine a great tesco-style slab, from 8 to 4 to 8 stories high, running the whole length of that block. Puke.
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please consider the possibility that they each reached their decision based on the facts and views presented to them, and on planning criteria.
OK, I've considered this, but I can't help but note that at the end, the vote divided purely on party political lines.
Coincidence or not?
Does this not undercut the point you make? I think Alan that you are kidding us when you imply this was some kind of "Conscience" or Free Vote that we sometimes see in Parliament.
This has all the appearance of a party political decision (albeit in a planning context) and not least because of the huge and premature transfer of public cash to the developer.
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