• CLLR Danny Beales (Wendling residents have your say, July 15) defended the ballot process at Wendling & St Stephen’s Estate where he’s keen to demolish the existing estate and build 200 social rent homes, 426 flats for sale and 86 intermediate homes (for example, Camden Living or up to 80 per cent market rent).

The nearby West Kentish Town Estate redevelopment numbers are 278 social rent, 511 for sale, 64 intermediate. These were the figures put before cabinet in July 2019 when it approved demolishing the two estates.

The projected cost of both developments is £600million which will add 55 per cent to the cost of Camden’s Community Investment Programme.

Bizarrely this vast expenditure only adds 18 additional social rent homes to our neighbour-hood. One can’t call that a strategic effort to meet our neighbourhood’s social housing need.

Cllr Beales doesn’t have a public target figure for the social rent homes our neighbourhood needs because Camden has never got round to producing a neighbourhood plan.

So other aspects of the neighbourhood condition have been neglected and left unstrategised; for example, open space, workspace and economic development, community facility provision, and more.

Place plans, masterplans, strategic regeneration plans, planning frameworks, community visions, etc have been promised by Cllr Beales and his predecessors since 2010 but not delivered.

He practises divide and rule, saying one group in the neighbourhood has primacy over another in relation to important and impactful development; while failing to acknowledge his preference for pushing massive schemes outside the framework of neighbourhood plan is the real problem.

I doubt if Cllr Beales has said much to tenants at Wendling and West Kentish Town (WKT) about tripling site density or that most of what is now their estate will belong to private leaseholders who will be in the vast majority when redevelopment is complete.

I’m sure little has been said about the scale of buildings or open space losses that Camden’s site densification approach relies on. And how long will the neighbourhood be subject to the disturbance of building work at WKT and Wendling?

Cllr Beales’s last estimate of the end-date for the WKT estate redevelopment was 2035. So 15 years aggravation is a reasonable guess.

The ballot process takes place before the reality of what’s happening becomes clear and tenants find out what tripling density means and how many years they will be surrounded by cranes and scaffolding.

What’s left unsaid at ballot stage relates to major issues of proper neighbourhood planning which the executive has cynically kicked into the long grass since 2010.

TOM YOUNG, NW5