Building in Hackney isn’t easy. You may remember the case of the block of flats delayed for months because the developer used the wrong type of heat pump. Or the case of Hackney’s planning officers recommending that the Shoreditch Works redevelopment’s 9,084 page application be refused, in part, because one bit of the development cast shadows on another bit of the development.
For the last three years, Hackney’s missed its housing target by almost half. And to be fair, Hackney is far from the worst London borough for housebuilding.
But Hackney is under new leadership. The Greens were elected on a pledge to “make building new council homes a core priority, using council-owned land and every available delivery route to increase supply of safe homes residents can actually afford.” So will the East London borough’s new Green administration do anything to change this? The initial signs aren’t promising.
Britain Remade’s past trips to planning hearings in Hackney have been educational, if not especially encouraging. So when Gareth Rowswell, a Britain Remade supporter and Hackney resident, recently attended a planning committee meeting in the borough, we were keen to hear what he made of it. His experience did little to give us confidence that Hackney’s housing shortage would be addressed anytime soon.
After spending just over half an hour on plans to erect a community sauna at The Castle Climbing Centre in Stoke Newington (they approved it), the committee moved on to what turned out to be a more contentious issue.
Lovell House is a 1960s council-owned tower block. A while back, one of its one-bedroom ground-floor flats was converted into a meeting space for the residents’ association. Hackney hasn’t been affordable for a while, but since the conversion the borough’s housing shortage has worsened. Monthly rents on a one-bed average just under two-thousand pounds and there’s currently a three-year minimum wait for a one bedroom council flat. Understandably, Hackney’s council wants to convert the meeting space back into a flat. Hackney’s planning officers are in favour. There’s just one problem: Hackney’s councillors.
x=
You might think that few things could be more straightforward than returning a one-bedroom flat to its original use (in a wholly residential block). You would be wrong. In Hackney, the loss of ‘social community infrastructure’ (i.e. this meeting room) can only be permitted in special circumstances.
Either the existing space is replaced with an equal (or better) space, or the existing community space is deemed to be redundant. To prove the latter, the applicant must jump through a number of hoops, including spending a year marketing the space for community use through a commercial landlord to show it was surplus to requirements. Hackney understandably decided to use the former route.
Hackney’s plan was to move the resident’s meetings to a space already used for other residents’ associations meetings just a four minute walk away.
So far, so good, but Hackney’s councillors were unconvinced. For the next hour and a half of the committee meeting, they raised a number of objections. These included that the council’s room booking system is ‘quite difficult to use’ and that the space is used for other tenant groups for whom there wasn’t an impact assessment.
In fact, the 128 page application covered both issues in detail, finding that there was sufficient capacity at the alternate meeting space and that the booking system in fact worked fine.
So were the councillors satisfied? In short, no. At first, they narrowly voted against the application (4 for, 5 against). However, they did offer a lifeline, ultimately deferring the decision until the applicant (Hackney Council) provides evidence on similar conversions, whether or not a four minute walk is a reasonable distance for the elderly, and even more information on how the transition ‘would impact existing users’.
Within Hackney Council’s planning application there is a Statement of Community Involvement, which cites work that stretches back to 2024. In other words, it will take at least two years simply to return a one-bedroom flat back to the council’s housing stock, that is, if they approve it.
Let that sink in. Hackney councillors elected on a pledge to “make building new council homes a core priority, using council-owned land and every available delivery route” failed to approve the council’s own application to convert a ‘community flat’ back into a one-bedroom flat (as it has been for most of its existence) on the grounds that its 128 page planning application, produced over two years, contained insufficient information at a time when there is a three-year waitlist in for a one-bedroom council flat in Hackney.
Madness. Utter madness
I wonder how much all this cost, spending the money on education would probably be a better idea.