moderngov.lambeth.gov.uk
The planning application for the Co living development is tomorrow.
There is a way to watch these online. I've forgotten how.
There will be speakers against the application.
Its Item three..
A few notes on the meeting.
Attended in person to speak against the application.
Its now limited to two minutes each and max three objectors.
Hard to hear what was said as the state of the art meeting room didn't appear to be working well
I think the opposition Cllr sent apologies.
Leaving the whole committee being Labour
The officer gave a long report on the scheme saying it should be accepted.
All three local Loughborough Junction Cllrs turned up to object.
There were three main issues brought up,
Transport classification is poor PTAL 3 in the planning jargon.
For a Co Living scheme it should be high. Officers went along with the developer in saying PTAL gave odd results sometimes and the adjacent areas had higher PTAL.
So a planning issue to oppose the scheme was dismissed by officers. This should not happen.
Residents are always told that to oppose an application then one must read up all the docs and find a genuine planning reason to oppose it.
However officers regard planning guidelines are flexible. In conjunction with a developer will decide that some planning guidelines can be treated as not that important in light of the whole scheme.
The developer had said in the docs that they thought the PTAL methodology was flawed. That Lambeth had introduced Active Travel policy. Walking and cycling. That the demographic that would use the Co living could walk more.
That's quite a troubling way a developer is using a green Lambeth policy. To get around need for good public transport links.
The methodology for PTAL is public transport links.
Second issue was that the Council had been working up separate planning guidelines for this site. Over two years. They are finished and off to external assessment.
So imo should carry planning weight. Officers claimed this was not the case and that as they had not been passed by the external assessment then committee should not take them into account.
The third thing was lack of affordable housing. Co Living requires no onsite affordable housing. The monetary replacement of that had been whittled down as I've already posted about. Using Viability assessments.
Strangely this is not something the developer went on about in their input to committee.
They managed to get one of their more youthful team to go on about how he had lived in co living and what a great product it was. Plus the got Pastor Lorraine from Dwaynamics to say how nice the developers were.
All in all what I expect from planning officers and committee.
At least Cllr Emma Nye was not impressed by all the great things the developer was saying and voted against. On basis that the gains ( section 106 ) didn't seem that good to her.
Most irritating was the Chair of the committee saying however strongly people felt the application had to be decided on policy.
And said Pastor Lorraine support of the scheme showed that the developers had done good job in getting in touch with the local community.
But imo policy was not followed. Yet again officers get to close to developers over long period when the had pre application meetings.
A major flaw in planning , from my experience , is that far from NIMBYS holding up plans local residents have much less input than the nimby argument makes.
