Leader – flimsy rules work in council’s favour

Kingsland High Street Dalston. Photograph: Eoin O'Donnell

What’s the point having rules if you simply waive them whenever they prove inconvenient?

This is what households in our borough are asking after the council decided to ignore its own commitments.

Recent changes to the regulations governing new buildings to give the green light to big developers to fling up a seven storey tower block containing no affordable housing.

This is not the first time councillors at the Town Hall have taken this blasé attitude towards their own rulebook, but perhaps their approach is not so much anarchistic as self-interested; they bend rules when it suits them.

Recent changes to the regulations governing development mean that the council gets extra revenue (via the Community Infrastructure Levy) for the construction of flats to be sold on the open market but not for all forms of social and affordable housing. This could explain why council bosses are tempted to fudge things, but at a time of soaring rents, this sort of behaviour is particularly galling.

The latest example of selective playing by the rules involves the Green Lanes Methodist Church site in Burma Road, Stoke Newington, a low-rise residential area flanked by the historic New River Walk.

Neighbours are steeling themselves for the arrival of bulldozers that will knock down the church to create space for expensive private flats.

One sympathises with the need for renovations to the church and nursery, but the plans might have been more appealing were they not completely at odds with the council’s pledges to create more of the affordable housing which everybody knows is so desperately needed.

The council says it granted planning permission because the block will bring “substantive benefits” to the local community. They argue that a new nursery, church and meeting rooms will be created, but all three of these already exist on the site, so quite it is unclear quite where the substance is.

Residents are aggrieved about the impact the block will have on them in terms of the reduction in sunlight reaching their flats and allotments.

The Burma, Arakan and Clissold Tenants and Residents Association has drawn attention to inaccuracies in how the project was presented to the council’s planning sub-committee, but its spokesman Oliver Cox said: “We were forbidden by the rules of the meeting from highlighting obvious errors in the answers given to the Chair.”

And so he was forced to remain silent because we can’t have people going against rules.

But now new plans for a development in Dalston also appear to include only 10% to 14% affordable units – far less than the 50% required under the Hackney’s Core Strategy – making one wonder whether the Town Hall won’t once again be tempted to bend the rules. The way the council operates needs to be reformed so that its policies are not so flimsy that they can be arbitrarily dismissed when the council finds it convenient to do so.