Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!
Blog Website Set up to Generate Support Comments for Hampden Road Plans
I'm not once for conspiracy theories, but I do have to admit to being somewhat suspicious about a sudden flurry of comments in support of Fairview's development plans at Hampden Road. All were generated by a form on a mysteriously sparse one page Wordpress website - fairviewhampdenroad.wordpress.com - screenshot below, lest the site should disappear.
Of the seven comments, three were from Lausanne, three from Frobisher and one from Wightman. (All are attached below as a single document)
All seven support comments show clearly that they originated from this Wordpress website. (Incidentally, they also all appear to come from the email address of someone called James Argles, But I believe that he is just the council officer in the panning team who printed the submissions for posting on the planning website).
Whoever orchestrated these support comments may just be a passionate local pro-housing type, or they may not. It may be they just want to give me and or HoL a bloody nose because they strongly disagree with what I've written. Whatever the truth of the matter, it's an unusual cluster of comments to find on a planning application, unusual enough to make one wonder.
Should you want to have your own say for or against this application, there's more info here.
Tags for Forum Posts: hampden road, hampden road development
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Hampden Supports.pdf, 48 KB
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Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by 0n59eal4meshz on
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"Clearly breaches Haringey's own planning criteria" Well, that's your claim Hugh, and we'll see how Haringey respond when they report.
But does it breach the London Plan, with its frequent warnings that guidelines(nb) must not be applied mechanistically, and applications must be assessed on their own merits as a whole?
Is it in conformity with the government's NPPF regulations?
All of these factors- which sometimes conflict- have to be taken into account.
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Permalink Reply by Michael Anderson on
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There is a hierarchy of what influences planning decision making but the decision needs to have been reached with regard to policies and strategies. Your right Stuart that policies don't have the same status as legislation. But as the planning system is weighed heavily in favour of the applicant (there is no third party right to appeal for instance) the decision can often be down to a judgement on the chances of success in an appeal against a decision to refuse or attach conditions
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Permalink Reply by Hugh on
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That's interesting, Michael. Thank you. So the implication here is that even though the application clearly and absolutely (without any shades of grey) breaches Haringey's tall buildings policy, it could still be approved if the Council were of the opinion that this would be insufficient to win out in the event of an appeal.
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Absolutely. A planning authority, as well as making a decision based on legislation and policies, will always have somewhere in the minds the likelihood of success at appeal if they refuse and application or insist on conditions the developer doesn't like. Developers get several bites of the cherry when it comes to appeal against refusal. The Planning Inspectorate, the Mayor of London (who has overturned a number of local planning decsions) and ultimately the Secretary of State on developments that are considered sufficiently significant.
The only option open to objectors if an application is approved is judicial review which is tortuous and incredibly expensive (to the extent that an individual or group of individuals really do put their necks on the block and risk financial ruin if the decision goes against them). And the only grounds that can be considered are that the planning authority acted improperly in reaching its decision, not the decision itself. -
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I have been copied in on a very interesting report which was published this week in a subscription only Planning professionals site around why "Viability Assessments Falling Short of Ethical Standards". For me I don't object to any new housing scheme in principle, but I do get hacked off when developers and their advisers knowingly under-estimate the end value of schemes to reduce (or in this case annihilate) their affordable housing obligations. If you think a read of said report would support your objection let me know.....
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Permalink Reply by James R Grinter on
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they're addresses belonging to O2, i.e. they're mobile phone users. A large number of people do only access the web via mobile, these days.
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We shouldn't lose sight of the fact that these could of course be completely genuine comments. In the absence of any facts, anything we say here is complete speculation.
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Permalink Reply by John McMullan on
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One theory put to me: Someone went door knocking with a tablet on 3G.
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Permalink Reply by Dolomite Police on
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On Frobisher we had representatives of Fairview knock on the door just after 5pm on Wednesday asking if we were aware of the development proposal and the window for commenting upon it. I thought this was weird - unless legally or contractually obliged I wouldn't want to flag the comments process to anyone if I were planning on building an unpopular development. Perhaps what they were doing was noting down comments from anyone who they could get anything positive from and then submitting these "on their behalf". There were 2-3 women doing this (a different person knocked on my neighbour's door for instance) and they didn't look to be picking houses selectively. From that perspective if all they got from several streets were a few vaguely non-negative comments (YES / we need more housing) it's actually a pretty poor haul for them. The person who knocked on my door had a clipboard but no tablet.
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That's really helpful. Thank you for the information. It sounds like it was pretty much as you and John speculate. They were probably taking comments and noting details of any person who they could get to say anything positive.
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Here are some excerpts from Oliver Wainright, writing in the Guardian about the influence of developers recently (my emphasis):
Across the country – and especially in superheated London where stratospheric land values beget accordingly bloated developments – authorities are allowing planning policies to be continually flouted, affordable housing quotas to be waived, height limits breached, the interests of residents endlessly trampled. Places are becoming ever meaner and more divided, as public assets are relentlessly sold off, entire council estates flattened to make room for silos of luxury safe-deposit boxes in the sky. We are replacing homes with investment units, to be sold overseas and never inhabited, substituting community for vacancy. The more we build, the more our cities are emptied, producing dead swathes of zombie town where the lights might never even be switched on.
We may rant and rage against ugly additions to the skyline, but what of the mechanisms that are allowing it to happen? How did it come to this?The principal reason can be traced to the fact that awarding planning permission in the UK comes down to a Faustian pact. If the devil is in the detail, then the detail is Section 106 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990, a clause which formalised “planning gain”, making it in the local authorities’ interests to allow schemes to balloon beyond all reason, in the hope of creaming off the fat of developers’ profits for the public good.
“Council chief executives will allow schemes to be pumped up as much as they can go before they get political push-back from councillors,” says one planning officer from a London borough that has suffered from a recent a spate of towers. “And the worst schemes happen when there is no political resistance at all.”
It is a system that is all too open to political pressure, given that any officer who advises against a new development can be conveniently framed as “anti-growth”, heartlessly preventing a promised tidal wave of new public amenities from flooding into the borough. Based on negotiation and discretion, the result is entirely down to the individual planning officer’s ability to squeeze out as good a deal as they can get, a battle that all too often ends in the developer’s favour.
The same story is repeated the other side of town, where Haringey awaits the momentous arrival of Tottenham Hotspur’s new £400m football stadium. This bulbous mothership was promised to bring 200 new homes, half of which would be “affordable”, and an abundance of public benefits to the area. But, once again, the affordable component has been mysteriously waived, replaced with 285 flats for solely private sale, while the Section 106 contribution has been reduced from an agreed £16m to just £477,000 – a token contribution towards transport improvements.
One former planning officer is frank about the reality of the imbalance in our confrontational system. “If you throw enough resources at a planning application, you’re going to manage to tire everyone out,” he says. “The documentation gets more and more extensive, the phone calls get more frequent and more aggressive, the letters ever more litigious. The weight of stuff just bludgeons everyone aside, and the natural inclination is to say, ‘Oh yeah okay, I’ve had enough of this one,’ and just let it through. It’s like a war of attrition.”
Bullied and undermined, planning authorities have been left castrated and toothless, stripped of the skills and power they need to regulate, and sapped of the spatial imagination to actually plan places. As one house-builder puts it simply, “The system is ripe for sharp developers to drive a bulldozer right through.” And they will continue to do so with supercharged glee, squeezing the life out of our cities and reaping rewards from the ruins, until there is something in the way to stop them.
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