Latest Pinkham Way Alliance briefing - July 2015
North London Waste Plan – to be considered by Haringey on Tuesday, July 14th .
The draft plan is going through the 7 Councils’ Cabinets/Committees . It is being considered/approved for consultation, which will start at the end of July and finish end-September. This is still quite an early stage – adoption of the plan is not scheduled until Autumn 2017, so there’s plenty of excitement still to come!!
The Pinkham Way site is, we’re sorry but not surprised to say, included. It had also been included in a 2014 draft.
As long ago as June 2014, PWA wrote to UrbanVision, NLWP consultants, after a Focus Group Meeting whichdealt with site selection criteria, complaining a) of bias as a result of the continuing determination to include the site and b) of untrue statements in the site description
Camden approved the draft waste plan for consultation on June 10th . They have been followed by Enfield on July 7th, and Barnet (9th). Haringey (14th), Islington (16th), Hackney (20th) and Waltham Forest (21st) end the process.
We appeared at the Enfield meeting and sent a letter to the Barnet Committee, which we also attended. We’ll be sending letters to all the others as well.
The Cabinets are also dealing with the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU), an agreement between the 7 Councils as to how the process of drafting and developing the plan will be organised.
Initially, the MoU had a confidentiality clause which stipulated that the whole process be done in secret, and even the fact that it was secret was to be kept secret – in perpetuity. We objected on grounds of unacceptable secrecy ahead of Camden’s meeting on June 10th . (Link to letter)
Discussion of the MoU at that meeting was deferred and the clause has now been modified. We still, however, have major concerns at the drive to keep any public scrutiny at bay.
Pinkham Way – LBH Site Allocations
You may remember that, in December 2012, the Inspector rejected the Council’s attempt to re-designate the site as Industrial Land, and recommended a full review of the site for the Site Allocation process. This, he said, should include;
- Assessment of Open Space value
- Assessment of ‘site specific’ features, such as the culverted stream
- Biodiversity
- the soundness of the dual designation of Employment/SINC
In March 2013, LBH made a public statement, pledging ‘openness and transparency’ in making decisions on Pinkham Way, and including the following specific undertakings:
- An Open Space/Biodiversity study
- Decisions on the designation to take into account the ‘findings and recommendations’ of the Inspector’s Report
- Decisions on designation, and subsequently on whether the site should be offered for the NLWP, to be taken by Cabinet in public
- In addition to this, the relevant Cabinet member has repeated several times that decisions will be 100% ‘evidence-based’
Has Haringey fulfilled the Inspector’s recommendations?
- Although the Council did a borough-wide Open Space study covering 90 sites, Pinkham Way was not included
- No study done on de-culverting the stream which runs north across the site. (The EA made strong recommendations for this in their SA submission of March 2014). We submitted work on this as part of our March 2015 submission.
- Biodiversity study – consultant made this comment on the site: ‘ … large, undisturbed site … a rare resource for Haringey of high ecological value’.
- (The site’s overall ‘wasteland’ habitat is one of 11 London Priority Habitats; within it there is a small area of Open Mosaic, a UK Priority Habitat. The site has around 1500 trees and well over 100 species of plants, plus a small number of endangered birds and other species. Identified by ex-London Wildlife Trust Habitat Survey Officer, in PWA Ecological Study 2013, as ‘important’ link in Green Chain) The site’s Employment Designation
- The Council’s advisors dismissed the site’s suitability for employment on its own. Atkins suggested that an assessment for viability by introducing a higher value element such as housing should be done – a study which was done for other major sites in Haringey and submitted as evidence by the Council.
- Although this borough-wide viability assessment was submitted as evidence by the Council for the Site Allocation consultation in March 2015, no assessment of Pinkham Way was included.
- A Freedom of Information request some six weeks after the consultation ended finally revealed a separate assessment. This purported to show that housing was viable to support employment, but only by using lower development costs than the assessments of all other LBH sites. Estimated remediation costs used in the study appear substantially lower than latest published guidance, which indicates a sum between 2 and 5 times as great.
- PWA has challenged the assessment’s validity
- Why should this apparent manipulation of figures be necessary? It should be remembered that, in order to be included in the NLWP, the employment designation MUST be retained.
- The Public Examination for Haringey’s site Allocations is scheduled for Feb 2016. While we can’t stop Haringey ignoring inconvenient evidence ad infinitum, there comes a time when ALL the evidence is independently examined by a Planning Inspector, and this is what will happen in February. THAT INCLUDES THE EMPLOYMENT DESIGNATION.
- We anticipate that the inspector will find the site’s employment designation to be unsound. In that
- case the site would be designated just as a SINC.
- If it stays in the NLWP simply as a Grade 1 SINC, Priority Habitat etc, its inclusion could not be sustained.
Has Haringey assessed all available evidence?
No. Considering it has omitted to gather evidence which it should reasonably have gathered – and which it was recommended to gather - the Council cannot possibly argue that.
Has it assessed all evidence submitted?
No
- On May 20th , PWA met LBH planners, the planners having previous undertaken to have studied PWA’s March 2015 SA submission by the time of the meeting. At the meeting they admitted they hadn’t. Subsequently, they claimed to have assessed our evidence and stated that the site would still be put forward for the draft NLWP
- Early in June, the Agenda Reports for Camden were published, among them the draft NLWP, which included the Pinkham Way site.
- The draft was dated May 6th . So the NLWP draft was completed without our evidence having been considered.
How does this leave the LBH Cabinet?
On July 14 th , the Cabinet will not, in our opinion, be ‘making decisions’ within the interpretation of the March 2013 statement. The decision has already been made, and the Cabinet’s position undermined by its own officers and those of other councils acting in secret, who have done exactly the same as in the previous plan. (This is why we pressed Haringey to make their statement in 2013.) In effect, the Cabinet is being challenged by them to overturn the decision to include the site. Our view is borne out by the submission of Enfield Council to LBH’s March 2014 SA consultation, advising Haringey ‘to ensure first’ that any decision on the site ‘does not prejudice waste site provision in relation to the NLWP’.
It’s our view that Enfield was speaking for the other NLWP councils.
The closing paragraph’s beginning ‘I really do suggest you give consideration to the above points’ is, to be polite, rather over-assertive!
Stephen Brice
July 9th 2015.
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