Sam Wilson

The greatest Six Nations ever.

Hackney Council voted 5:2 last night against the planning dept's recommendation to reject the Shoreditch Works densification scheme. But in a rather baffling twist, the chair said they could not actually accept the scheme, so the decision has been deferred. Some thoughts: 1. Hackney has a lot of great councillors. The committee was extremely conscientious, battling through mountains of technical detail in a meeting that ran non-stop from 6:30pm to midnight. Crucially, they kept sight of the big picture – the fact that, whatever view one may take on certain fine details, this is basically a brilliant and even world-leading scheme. 2. The planning officers seemed like intelligent and decent people, but they had become very wound up over relatively minor details. Most of their attention was absorbed by a tortuous debate about the fact that the developer was only offering a discount to council-favoured businesses on 7 percent of the floorspace, rather than 10 percent as the council prefers. Whatever you may think about this question (and personally I am sceptical about the idea of 'affordable workspace' generally), it seemed like an insane reason to reject the whole development. 3. I was left with renewed unease about the Govt's plans to delegate more decisions to officers rather than councillors. Sometimes councillors have more perspective than officers, and can thus bring some common sense to decision-making. I know councillors can be a bit daft too, but the choice between the two doesn't seem straightforward to me. 4. Time is now very short. Hackney has elections in May and will enter purdah in March. Labour is likely to take heavy losses in the local elections and the council may fall to the Greens. I hope I am wrong, but I suspect the Greens will be hostile to the scheme. There is a pro-building majority on the planning committee at the moment, but they have only seven weeks to get this application back in front of them, and a chair who is determined to block it. The portcullis is falling. The silver lining, however, is that GLA may intervene to approve the scheme. The events of last night surely made that more likely. 5. Is it normal for the chair to be openly hostile to the applicant, and openly biased against them? I haven't seen it before, but maybe I have been lucky in my planning committees. I was very surprised when the chair refused to let the (pro-development) ward councillor for Shoreditch speak, despite its being reqested by another member of the committee. Surely it is natural for the elected representative of the affected area to have a voice? 6. The evening was interesting for those, like me, who are interested in the underlying political economy of land-use restrictions. In general, development control exists to prevent disruption to local people. But southern Shoreditch has hardly any local residents and the local office workers (such as me) are sympathetic or indifferent to the scheme. The council received only 3 letters of opposition, less than the average suburban conservatory extension! Pretty much nobody is opposed to this massive development on account of its having negative effects on them, because it doesn't have any negative effects on anyone. What we see here, then, is an institutional infrastructure ultimately generated by NIMBYism, continuing to operate even when NIMBYism is absent. I suspect there are many such cases.