Westferry printworks appeal

My speaking points to the Inspector at the appeal
Site at: Former Westferry Printworks Site, 235 Westferry Road, London, E14 3QS
Appeal by: Westferry Development Limited
PINS Reference: APP/E5900/W/19/3225474LPA
Reference: PA/18/01877/A1
​
Submitted at 9am 20th May

1. I am speaking as the Councillor for Canary Wharf ward in which this application is wholly located, I was first elected in May 2014 and I am also speaking on behalf of the Isle of Dogs Neighbourhood Planning Forum, I have been the Secretary of the Forum since its inception in the autumn of 2014.

 

1. In the interest of transparency I should point out that I am an opposition Councillor at LBTH.

 

1. I live 3 minutes’ walk from the site and I know it well passing it most days.

 

1. I have attended every public meeting about this scheme since first elected including at the GLA decision meeting in 2016, the Tower Hamlets Councils Strategic Development Committees and parts of the 2018 planning appeal but I did not attend the High Court decision in 2020 to squash the earlier approval.

 

1. I am a qualified accountant by background but I have gained a lot of planning experience in the last 8 years but this is only my second appeal hearing so I apologise in advance for the errors I am about to make.

 

1. I now support the 2016 permitted scheme but not this larger scheme. I have deep concerns about what I call the Manhattan-isation of the Isle of Dogs that permitting this scheme will lead to, setting even more precedent for more tall buildings. I see no evidence that this will lead to sustainable development in practise only the delivery of the highest housing targets in England. By my calculation the Isle of Dogs and South Poplar area has to deliver 1.04% of England’s housing targets. 

 

1. We have a lot of very large planning applications in the system for decision not least the 1,972 homes at ASDA Crossharbour due to be decided on the 9th June as well as in pre-application like the 33 storey Pepper Saint Ontiod scheme close to this site.

 

1. Three years ago the Isle of Dogs already contained four of the twelve densest small places in the UK according to the ONS. Tower Hamlets (Millharbour) 032D, the LSOA to the immediate north-east of the Printworks has a population density equivalent to 102,692 people per square kilometre as at mid-2018 and new developments have been completed since then. Tower Hamlets 032B is to the immediate north of the Printworks is the 11th densest place in England & Wales. Every major planning application in the area substantially exceeds that of the old London Plan target of 1,200 habitable rooms per hectare and we are heading for a density of around 900 homes per hectare.

 

1. I wish to speak about the Neighbourhood Plan history and policies, the Secondary School Lease where I wish to remind you about what I remember you being told at the 2018 appeal, a suggested condition for the secondary school and what happened to the Isle of Dogs and South Poplar Opportunity Area Planning Framework after it was approved in September 2019 and specifically to the Development Infrastructure Funding Study as well as the GLA commissioned Isle of Dogs and South Poplar Integrated Water Management Plan published in October 2020, all are relevant to the inquiry. Lastly I have a suggestion for how you can visit the site without leaving your office.

 

1. In terms of the Neighbourhood Plan first an update.

 

1. Last night at the Tower Hamlets Council Annual General Meeting Councillors voted to approve the Neighbourhood Plan being Made confirming that the Council has no objections. 

 

1. I think it would be useful for the Inspector to point that although this is new for him that the Neighbourhood Plan has a long history and pre-dates to some extent this planning application. The Isle of Dogs Neighbourhood Planning Forum submitted its application for recognition on the 1st December 2014 but was not recognised until April 2016. It submitted an earlier Neighbourhood Plan in 2017 but in May 2018 this was rejected by the Examiner largely because the GLA did not as promised release the OAPF for the IoD and South Poplar in 2017 but released it the evening before the public examination of that Neighbourhood Plan.

 

1. So a second and similar Isle of Dogs Neighbourhood Plan was submitted to the Council on the 23rd October 2019. It is a de-risked version of the original Plan but with very similar objectives and policy aspirations.

 

1. On 18th December 2019, the Mayor in Cabinet agreed that the new Neighbourhood Plan met the statutory requirements for neighbourhood plans, and should proceed to a Regulation 16 consultation and independent examination. The Regulation 16 consultation was held between 9th January and 19th February 2020.

 

1. The Isle of Dogs Neighbourhood Plan Examination report was issued on the 14th April 2020 and was approved to go to referendum by Mayor John Biggs on the 12th May 2020. It has had significant weight in the planning system since the 12th May 2020. The referendum was then delayed by COVID.

 

1. The Neighbourhood Plan was then approved at referendum on the 6th May 2021 by 86% of eligible votes. 

 

1. So this Neighbourhood Plan and the aspirations of the community are not new. 

 

1. In terms of the compliance of this application with the Neighbourhood Plan I strongly disagree with what Ms Nelupa Malik said yesterday, I find it very odd that in 55 pages of her planning proof it mentions the Neighbourhood Plan only briefly once despite it now being part of the development framework. The Neighbourhood Plan was written to deal with schemes like this. It maybe that being the 1st Neighbourhood Plan to reach referendum stage in east London this is all new and unfamiliar for Council planning officers. I hope you can help rectify that.

 

1. The Secretary of State by contrast has recognised the importance of Neighbourhood Plan in his decisions for example the Wheatley Neighbourhood Plan over the Wheatley Campus site.

 

1. I would like to remind you now of the 4 letters that have been submitted, the first one submitted by myself last August to Mr Philip Barber and then a 2nd in January to your programme officer. And then two letters from the Forum, one last September to Mr Barber and a 2nd in January. I won’t repeat all of the contents of those four letters but will focus on the key points and to provide updates on what has changed or not since those letters were written.

 

1. The Neighbourhood Plan is trying to solve some of the specific problems that development has caused here in order to raise the bar on the quality of future development. It could be argued it enables future development by ensuring that current development does not run the area into the ground. And that we do not run out of social infrastructure in an area that was mostly industrial a generation ago.

 

1. So the future of the school is critical to us. I pass the site almost every day and it remains empty and untouched despite being granted planning permission in April 2016. In the meantime the applicant has demolished the site, dug a large basement and prepared the utility connections. But for the school no preparation work at all. 

 

1. On the 4th August 2016 a S106 agreement with the applicant was signed which included this section. "Secondary School Opening Date " means the start of the 2022/2023 academic year or such other date as the Council and the Owner may agree in writing;” it is now May 2021 nothing has happened.

 

1. This is despite Canary Wharf College Secondary occupying a converted office building nearby whose planning permission expires in 2023, it has no proper sports facilities nor outside play space. That building can only take 420 pupils. Tower Hamlets Council has closed secondary schools with 500 plus pupils on the basis that it is not financially sustainable to maintain a secondary school with so few pupils. And there is a track record of free schools across the country closing when they cannot find permanent sites.

 

1. I have a strong memory of the earlier 2018 appeal that when the school lease was last discussed that the applicant offered to sign the school lease the next day on the proviso that the lease be with the Department of Education and not LBTH as it then was. You may wish to check your own notes or ask the applicant what they said to confirm this. It was confirmed on the 23rd September 2020 that the lease would be transferred to the Department of Education from LBTH but the actual paperwork to confirm that was not issued until January of this year I believe. 

 

1. Cllr Peter Golds will speak later (or has already done so ) about the letter dated 4th May 2021 from Baroness Berridge of the Vale of Catmose, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the School System which confirms that as of that date no lease had been signed despite discussions between the applicant and the department. I hope that you have access to that letter.

 

1. Residents are now assuming that the developer will delay and delay signing the lease so that Canary Wharf College fails perhaps in the hope that they can get the land back at some future point. 

 

1. We would strongly urge you after 5 years of delay and prevarication to add a condition that says granting any permission (if that is what you are minded to do) would be conditional on the lease being signed first. And that MHCLG co-ordinate with their colleagues in the Department of Education on this issue.

 

1. I know turn the Neighbourhood Plan policies. This application is a mixture of compliance and non-compliance. Not everything I have to say is negative. For example part of the evidence base to support our construction policies were informed by the good work Mace and the applicant did during construction. I am not saying that demolition and digging the basement was a pleasant process, it was not and I think we all learned lessons from that. But the community engagement was much better than on other sites and used as evidence to support our policies.  

 

1. But on our other key policies the application is either silent or non-compliant. In the applicants response via DP9 on the 25th August to Mr Philip Barber in Appendix A is their response to the Neighbourhood Plan policies. We responded to that in our letter to Mr Philip Barber on the 23rd September. So I now summarise the key policy issues.

 

1. Policy D1 – Infrastructure Impact Assessment. It says applicants are required to complete and submit an Infrastructure Impact Assessment as part of the planning application. And by infrastructure we use the London Plan definition.  No assessment has been submitted. 

 

1. Also a reminder that the London Plan Policy D2 Infrastructure requirements for sustainable densities has very similar objectives, I am not sure that the GLA mention that. The IoD and South Poplar OAPF and its Development Infrastructure Funding Study are based on the smaller scheme so infrastructure planning would have to be updated if this is approved.

 

1. Sir Edward Lister, the then Deputy Mayor for Planning said in 2014 in a GLA press release: “South Quay is enjoying unprecedented interest from developers all of whom want to bring forward their own plans. While we want to see the comprehensive regeneration of the area, what we cannot allow is a situation where planning is granted on a first-come-first-served basis with no overall strategy, as this could eat up valuable space, have a negative impact on the public realm and potentially cause other schemes to collapse.” South Quay is just to the north of this site. This Policy is designed to ensure that strategy happens on each site.

 

1. In the applicants response on the 25th August 2020 it suggests that information has been provided within other parts of the application but when we then look at those reports they are not really an infrastructure impact assessment. 

 

1. So for example when the Utilities Infrastructure Report is read it says nothing about capacity. It is a report about connections to the various utility networks: not whether those utility networks will be ready to supply this new development and all of the other ones with planning permission that are not yet complete.

 

1. And we have two pieces of evidence that water in particular is a major concern. 

 

1. First we have in October 2020 the publication of the Isle of Dogs and South Poplar Integrated Water Management Plan commissioned by the GLA and written by AECOM. I am not sure that is in your list of documents. But it is relevant.

 

1. Its Executive Summary starts by saying “The scale of growth planned for the Isle of Dogs and South Poplar to 2041 poses a significant challenge for the delivery of water services infrastructure in the area. Much of the existing infrastructure is close to, or already at capacity; and flood risk and water quality are key concerns in many parts of the area.” It goes on to make a number of recommendations. I am not sure the applicant has reflected that.

 

1. Then on the 12th February 2021 Thames Water in response to the almost 2,000 homes ASDA Crossharbour site a few hundred meters away said, “Water Comments Following initial investigations, Thames Water has identified an inability of the existing water network infrastructure to accommodate the needs of this development proposal.” They said the same thing in 2020. Have they been asked for an update on this scheme?

 

1. Think about that we cannot even be sure that there will be sufficient water for your morning shower or cup of tea and the impact may not be on this scheme but sites further south without water storage tanks and pumps. I have been asking Thames Water since at least 2015 when they will expand the water supply to the Isle of Dogs, as of 2021 nothing has happened.

 

1. Returning to the applicants claims of compliance Rapid Health Impact Assessment appendix says nothing about GP surgery capacity either.

 

1. The Environmental Statement’s Non-technical Summary does not really summarise the infrastructure situation, although it does summarise the other planning applications in the area. For example it says, “The Development will include a health centre.” But it is unclear what that means. Is it appropriately sized to be an NHS surgery? Have the NHS been involved in the design? What is the demand?

 

1. So no infrastructure impact assessment means we cannot be sure of the infrastructure impact of this larger application. That is contrary to both Neighbourhood Plan and Policy D2 of the London Plan. It would be prudent therefore to reject this larger application until such an assessment is properly compiled so that the Minister can assess the risks of permitting an application that could for example overload the infrastructure stopping future development as Sir Ed Lister worried about.

 

1. Policy ES1 – Use of empty sites – the applicant suggests that as they have a fall back application they do not need to deliver this policy. But the local area is littered with developments which have stalled and made no progress even those with multiple historical applications, even applications which have paid their CIL before stalling or where monthly payments have to paid to McDonalds Restaurants as compensation for the failure to re-deliver a local McDonalds. These are developers that also thought they would build. Given that planning is about land use we have too many local sites where the land is of no current use except for keeping the security industry busy. This policy was designed to encourage the use of land even when development stalls. There is no guarantee that whatever happens with this application that anything gets built. So we would ask that the policy be implemented so that this enormous site is not wasted if the applicant cannot go ahead given market uncertainty or an inability to raise funds. 

 

1. Policy SD1 – Sustainable Design – the applicants letter was silent on the Home Quality Mark; we have no idea to what independent standards that these new homes will be built. The Home Quality Mark is described as helping house builders to demonstrate the high quality of their homes and to differentiate them in the marketplace. At the same time, it gives householders the confidence that the new homes they are choosing to buy or rent are well designed and built, and cost effective to run. It provides impartial information from independent experts on a new home’s quality and sustainability.

 

1. We must therefore assume the applicant does not wish to prove their development is of high quality or sustainable to an objective standard and you and the Minister may wish to consider that given the crisis in the industry over the fire safety of homes. 

 

1. Policy 3D1 – 3D model for applications – the applicants letter says, “A 3D model of the development was available during the public inquiry.” I assume they refer to a physical 3D model on the table in front of you in 2018 – the policy is very clear; it refers to an electronic model.

 

1. The Vu.City 3D model which the Council has a license to has been used by them to develop a Tall Building Supplementary Planning Document which has now finished two phases of public consultation. I believe that you would find the visuals in the 2nd phase consultation for the Isle of Dogs to be of great interest and of course you can ask for your own CGI views. 

 

1. And I would urge the Inspector to view the site and the wider area via this 3D model including consented schemes as well as other schemes in the planning system, to visit the site via computer. The model includes the 2016 permitted application but not this application. Once you have seen a demo of the system you will understand why locally we are so keen on using the latest technology in planning.

 

1. My last point is in case the Minister decides to approve this scheme. If he or she does then they need to directly intervene as regards the delivery of new infrastructure locally. I have no confidence in the GLA nor LBTH being able to support the scale of development locally. As evidence you may wish to review actual infrastructure delivery against the GLA commissioned Development Infrastructure Funding Study from November 2017 which specified what infrastructure needed to be delivered each year including in phase1 between April 2017 and March 2022. 

 

1. You might wish to ask LBTH how much money they have earnt in s106, New Homes Bonus and CIL in the last twenty years on the Isle of Dogs and how much of that remains unspent , what was spent in the area, and what was spent elsewhere? Why after four attempts have we only now got a planning application for the new South Dock bridge, years behind schedule. How much of the value of the s106, CIL and NHB has been lost through inflation over the last 6 years  (you will found the numbers deeply shocking). The imminent loss of the local Police station, continued uncertainty over the 1966 built Tiller Road leisure centre next to this site. I could go on. I suspect one reason why the applicant previously resisted paying CIL is that local developers see it is a tax, that it will be spent elsewhere or not at all; and not money that will benefit their own scheme by providing great local infrastructure which can then benefit future residents and in turn justify the additional sales cost.

 

1. The Minister needs to consider this if they want high density development locally. They also need to consider the impact on the world class sailing centre in the docks of this approval.

 

1. I could say a lot more but I will stop there.

 

1. Happy to be grilled on all of this. 

 
Cllr Andrew Wood
Email: cllrandrewwood@gmail.com
Phone: 07710 486 873