• WITH the council’s decision to allow early demolition of 100 Avenue Road, residents are back exactly where they started four tortuous long years ago when Camden officers, in their wisdom, decided that a 24-storey tower would be just dandy kerplunked into the heart of Swiss Cottage.

It is high time for local residents and communities throughout the United Kingdom to refuse forthwith to jump through any more planning “consultation” hoops and put their mighty energies instead where there is at least an outside chance of succeeding.

What utter mugs we are, sometimes fighting for years to stop a development that the local council has long since colluded with developers to force upon the community no matter how unanimous their objections.

If the 99.9 per cent majority against the 24-storey tower counted for nothing, what hope in the process can there possibly be?

The consultation system legitimises one set of obstacles after another.
The truth is, the game is already lost in the earliest pre-planning consultation stage when council officers are actually encouraged to “work with customers in order to agree acceptable proposals”.

Note that developers are referred to as “customers”, who we all understand pay.

And so they do, via Community Infrastructure Levy and Section 106 payments to the council to compensate for the harm their schemes cause local communities.

If by some miracle enough planning committee councillors stop playing on their iPhones long enough to listen to objections and vote against a proposed development – further, hierarchical obstacles kick in: the mayor, judicial review judge, appeal judge, the secretary of state, each with draconian powers to reverse a council’s decision to refuse a development and all poised to implement government “housing policy”, and to hell with the community.

To avoid this detestable and ultimately doomed long-drawn out exercise in futility, the planning consultation process on large-scale builds must be discredited, disdained and discarded and residents must refuse to participate.

Instead, to save everyone a great deal of time and money, why not give local authorities the totalitarian power to permit and impose any developer’s scheme that takes their fancy. In the end, they do this anyway.

EDIE RAFF
Chair, Cresta House
Residents Association