Save Tidemill & Reginald House update

Save Tidemill campaigners met with the new Mayor of Lewisham Damien Egan and new Cabinet Member for Housing Cllr Paul Bell on Tuesday evening to demand that the redevelopment plans for Tidemill be re-drawn and that Reginald House residents, whose homes will be demolished as part of the plans, are given a ballot on the regeneration of their homes.

Before and during the meeting protesters staged a demo outside Lewisham Civic Suite, with their numbers swelling as night fell.

Save Tidemill campaigners outside Catford Town Hall on Tuesday evening

The meeting and protest came the day after a small group of Save Tidemill members, accompanied and supported by GLA Member for Lewisham & Greenwich Len Duvall, met with the Deputy Mayor of London for Housing James Murray to discuss how the GLA might 'call in' the scheme in order to explore alternative options that took the local community's needs into account. But later on the same day, to Len Duvall's great annoyance and campaigner's disappointment, the Mayor of London announced his final word on the scheme and passed it back to Lewisham Council, having declined the campaign's request for the GLA to take control of the development. 

But he also urged the Council to give Reginald House residents a ballot. Monday's GLA report stated, "in line with his Good Practice Guide the Mayor wants to see ballots used as widely as possible, and so he would urge the landlord of this scheme to undertake one”. 

The GLA signed off on providing funding for much of the affordable housing on the site earlier in the year, which led to Reginald House residents (as one of 34 sites due for demolition across the capital where planning permission has already been granted) being exempted from the new ballot rules when they are implemented. So this was either a cop-out or a challenge to Lewisham Council: if the council is actually behind the idea of ballots (as promised in the Lewisham Labour manifesto), there might still be time to implement one for this scheme. The GLA knew there was still time to change.

Although the plan to demolish Reginald House was approved by the planning committee in September 2017, the process is still incomplete and requires a sign off on the Section 106 agreement with the development partners, housing association Family Mosaic (now part of Peabody Homes) and private developer Sherrygreen Homes. In addition, the contract with them was signed 4 years ago this very month and is due for renewal. During that time, Family Mosaic have merged with Peabody. So it sounds like a great time to review the contract, and for a new administration to embark on a bold new plan to get a better deal than the original contract which sees our dear leaders disposing of publicly owned land to private developers for a quarter of its value.

Campaign banner on the side of Frankham House

Len Duvall also joined and led the meeting with Mayor Egan and Cllr Bell on Tuesday evening on behalf of the campaigners, and opened up the discussion for everyone to speak. Apart from the demand for a ballot for Reginald House, the main request was that Egan and Bell go back to the drawing board with the plans for the site and not push through the current plans which so many local people oppose. 

Save Tidemill said their alternative architectural plan for the site (which Egan and Bell seemed unaware of) showed that it is possible to keep Reginald House and Tidemill Garden whilst building at least the same number of units as current plans; it demonstrated that there was another way. Unfortunately, when originally presented to the Council and its partners in 2016, it had been quickly dismissed without any consideration. Monday's GLA report noted that the alternative plan hadn't even passed through any pre-application examination, but in reality this was because the Council hadn't permitted any examination to take place. 

Save Tidemill told Mayor Egan and Cllr Bell how they have continually tried to engage with the planning process but have been ignored and even sneered at by the Council's development partners. Len Duvall said the community and the residents of Reginald House had been treated appallingly by the Council and this should never happen again. Both Egan and Bell blamed the previous administration for the way things had been handled, with Bell stating he would not entertain the scheme in its present form if it were to come to him now as a new proposal. 

The fact that the new Mayor was Cabinet Member for Housing in the previous administration and would have therefore overseen the scheme was defended by Cllr Bell with the assertion that the new Mayor will no longer be the sole decision-maker in Mayor & Cabinet, unlike his predecessor, Mayor Bullock. One wonders what exactly Egan was doing all that time as he seemed (as did Bell) not to be at all familiar with any of the details of the Tidemill scheme (other than perhaps the affordable housing quota). Cllr Bell then robustly defended one of the campaigner's claims that making Mayor & Cabinet more democratic made no difference because it was still the same unelected Council Officers who were running the show and lying to Councillors in order to get schemes approved. It was later revealed that Cllr Bell had come to the meeting armed with inaccurate figures prepared by those same officers.

Campaigner outside Catford Town Hall on Tuesday evening

The regeneration plans for Tidemill were drawn up by the Council more than four years ago, in a process which began in 2008 after several permutations looked at how the land at the old Tidemill School could pay for the blingy landmark Deptford Lounge, the development of which LBL had fronted and which the school moved into in 2012 (and promptly became an academy!). The housing element of the scheme was built by Galliard and sold to L&Q and is now known by its tenants as the Titanic as it was so badly built. Two other council blocks in Giffin Street were originally included for demolition in the Tidemill scheme, but were dropped from the final plans due to fierce opposition from leaseholders. In 2014 Family Mosaic won the tender to deliver the scheme and promised to provide 35% affordable housing. However, they were unable to deliver more than 11% (or 16% according to the Council) when the application went to planning in September 2016. This was the main reason it got 'deferred' and sent back to the drawing board by the Strategic Planning Committee. 

Campaigners outside the town hall

Another year went by while Reginald House residents waited to find out their fate – with their lives, as well as repairs to their homes, on hold.

Although very little at all changed on the design of the scheme, the September 2017 application saw quite an improvement in affordable quotas, due to Family Mosaic's convenient merger less than a month before with the much larger Peabody Homes, who have better access to GLA subsidies. The quota rose to 37% (or 41% according to the Council) and the application was passed by 4 out of 6 members of the Strategic Planning Committee (with 3 of the committee being absent!). In the meantime, the GLA policy had changed and they now required schemes to have 50% affordable in order to access funding. So it was another six months before a figure just below 50% (the Council say 54%) was achieved due to the Council accessing its magic money tree and finding an extra £4.2m to contribute to the project in March 2018. As we have written before, none of the figures are publicly available, but it is unlikely that Sherrygreen Homes will be out of pocket and will still make a guaranteed 20% profit on the development, subsidised by public funding. 

Currently the proposals are for 209 homes, of which 74 would be 'socially rented'. While the tenants at Reginald House have been promised (nothing in writing) that they will pay the same Council rents as they do now, everyone else housed from the waiting list in the new 'social housing' will in fact have to pay London Affordable Rent, which in Lewisham is actually around 37% more.

As if you didn't know by now, the Council's plans also require the destruction of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden, a thriving 20 year old community garden originally created by children, teachers, and parents from Tidemill School with public funding. When the school moved, the garden was taken over by Assembly SE8 and local volunteers, who developed it into an educational and community wildlife garden that attracted both funding and ultimately accolades from the GLA Greener Cities programme which cited the garden as a case study in August 2017. The planning submission in September 2016 put paid to all this educational and outreach work as who would fund a space that might close at any minute? But volunteers have been trying to keep the garden open ever since with occasional events, and have kept the grounds in great shape. 

Events in the garden this June (click to enlarge)

Meanwhile, the Council insists on referring to it as 'meantime use' which negates the fact that it is an open green space that has existed for more than 20 years in an area where green space is being depleted. They even managed to persuade the GLA planning officers that it was merely a bit of brownfield scrubland that local volunteers couldn't manage to keep open regularly enough for it to be considered a public amenity – conveniently forgetting to remind the GLA how one of its other departments have supported and promoted it so keenly. 

Reginald House residents have been living with the threat of demolition for 10 years. More recently they have been harassed by council officers continually wanting to assess their housing need and to see proof of identity of everyone living in the property. One resident told the meeting with Egan and Bell how she had been racially abused by a council officer when she refused to answer the door to them, news of which appeared to shock them deeply. The Council has not responded in any meaningful way to the residents’ most recent petition (signed by 80% of them) other than by an acknowledgement from the Housing Strategy Team that could be read as a threat to keep harassing them. 

The Council's response to the Reginald House petition (click to enlarge)

Pauline, Sonia and Diann asked Egan and Bell not only for a ballot but also for Lewisham Homes to undertake repairs needed to their homes to make them safe and decent. Reginald House is structurally sound and has had a new roof, boilers, kitchens and bathrooms within the last few years. However Lewisham Homes has been ignoring requests for minor repairs, whilst failing to carry out more major refurbishment such as double glazing, external decorations and new fire-safety front doors. This has left the tenants with rotting and drafty windows, blocked sinks, unpainted walls, dangerous electrical powerpoints and other neglected repairs including front doors that not only don't meet fire safety regulations but are also falling off their hinges.  

After hearing about the harassment by council officers, the lack of formal written offers and the appalling state of non-maintenance of their homes, Cllr Bell told the tenants at the meeting “I personally guarantee that I will look at it myself” before passing the buck to local councillor Brenda Dacres who was also in attendance. God knows how Dacres is going to find time to liaise with Lewisham Homes on tenant's behalf, having just become joint-Cabinet Member for Parks, Neighbourhoods & Transport with responsibilities for "Arts, Sports, Leisure, Culture, Town Centres, High Streets, Night Time Economy Strategy, Parking Enforcement, Highways and Transport".

The residents kept saying they did not want to lose their homes and were not interested in the new homes, but Bell's response was to continue to encourage them to consider how they would best like to be accommodated in the scheme – ultimately sounding, in his repetition, not dissimilar to a holiday resort timeshare rep – whilst insisting that “the Council’s biggest priority is its residents”.

We have to wonder exactly what Lewisham Homes' role in estate regeneration is. They seem to be complicit in 'managed decline' (when an estate is allowed to get run down over a number of years prior to long-planned redevelopment, a tactic used most often to justify demolition) whilst benefitting from it. An FOI request has revealed that in the time that £104,000 was taken from Reginald House residents in rent and service charges, only £126 was spent on repairs. We have seen the same at Achilles Street in New Cross, where repair expenditure over 6 years was less than £240k while income to Lewisham Homes was over £2.6m, and the Council's plans for that site (the demolition of 87 homes and 15 or more independent businesses) haven't even gone to planning yet. 

Reginald House residents have heard very little from Lewisham Homes but a lot from Lewisham's Housing Strategy Officers, whose verbal promises have not been supported by written assurances. Tenants fear their close-knit community will be broken up, they'll be given smaller homes, have their rent increased and lose their gardens. Even with the best promises in the world, they don't want to leave the homes that they love. Their roots are not just in the area, but in the very fabric of their homes.

Reginald House and the garden beyond (Winter 2018)

Campaigners are hoping that Egan and Bell will spend further time in considering their demands, and come to a more enlightened and progressive view on how the scheme proceeds. Ideally they might reflect on their election pledges to offer ballots to residents threatened by demolition, and not to sell strategic land to developers. Both pledges negate what is happening at Tidemill, and the power is now in their hands to change things. 

They could pay more than lip service to existing core policies such as Objective 5 (to reduce carbon emissions), Objective 7 (to protect and capitalise on open spaces and environmental assets) and Objective 11 (to strengthen quality of life and well-being). With 79 trees proposed to be felled at Tidemill Garden, perhaps they could also pay attention to their Biodiversity Action Plan in which they promise to "maintain, protect and increase the number and quality of trees in the borough" and that's not even mentioning the full biodiversity of Tidemill Garden, let alone the opportunity it offers local people, especially children, to experience nature on their doorstep, instead of being municipalised into a clinical environment by a remote elite in Catford.

In the past, Cllr Bell supported the local campaign "Don't dump on Deptford's Heart" to stop Tideway Tunnel from taking over the green amenity next to St Paul's Church on Deptford Church Street to build a shaft that could have been built by the river. Locals lost that campaign – as well as 44 trees and a large chunk of green. Tideway construction vehicles are now queuing up in a lorry park on Deptford Church Street, adjacent to Frankham House (and opposite Cremer House) with the bus lane disabled, contributing to increased pollution in Deptford Church Street that is unmitigated by the loss of trees at the St Paul's site (till 2022), and will not be helped by the loss of green space at Tidemill. Nor at No.1 Creekside, but that's another urgent post to come. 

In 2013, while serving on the Strategic Planning Committee Cllr Bell was minded to refuse permission to Workspace plc for their redevelopment of Faircharm Trading Estate. At the meeting he made an impassioned speech about how "Deptford is always being 'done to' – and never 'with' ". He's now in a better position to stop us being 'done to', but the impression campaigners got at Tuesday's meeting is that there won't be any changes at Lewisham Council that will benefit Deptford any time soon. 

To arrange interviews with Save Reginald House and Tidemill campaigners, or for more information on the campaign please contact Harriet Vickers, 07817724556, harriet.vickers@gmail.com

Also see the Save Tidemill Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/savetidemill/

For the many, not the few – Lewisham Labour on housing (Besson St + Achilles St)

Not sure why red leaflets keep popping through the letter box chez Crossfields. It's not as though Labour aren't going to win the local election anyway, and voting Labour in local elections is not going to get rid of this awful Tory government!

According to one of the flyers, local ward councillors Brenda Dacres, Joe Dromey and Paul Maslin are standing up "for the many not the few". But living in Deptford, one wonders who "the many" are, since Deptford isn't mentioned once in their flyer.

In the other flyer, New Cross Labour are announcing a 'radical' manifesto. Deptford's mentioned twice, but only in the small print. Apparently Paul Maslin grew up here (though he doesn't live here anymore) and is "a partner in an art gallery". That'll be the one that used to be on Deptford High Street which he sold up to move to trendy Shoreditch; the lovely cafe and gallery that he flogged to "Jennings The Bookmaker" who sold it on to Coral, which precipitated an escalation of betting shops arriving on the high street that the rest of us then had to fight off. Thanks, Paul.

Deptford is also mentioned in the boast that New Cross Labour "secured the return of the Deptford anchor to our high street". What high street is that then? New Cross High Street? In any case, as local artists and residents who did most of the work to bring back the anchor have logged in full, it took four years and a petition of 4,000 people before Lewisham Labour agreed to return it. New Cross ward councillors played only a small part.

With the mantra "For the many, not the few"(a phrase first coined by New Labour in the 90s) we presume they mean the self-serving 'one per cent' who hold all the power and wealth. But the left has always championed the minority, surely. So what about when "the few" are tenants and leaseholders who don't want to be forced out of their homes so that Lewisham can house "the many" in their expensive 'place-making' vanity projects?

In its Green Paper on Housing, Labour promise to reverse all the damaging Tory housing policies of the past few years, but this may not be radical enough, as estate regeneration (demolishing perfectly sound homes) is still on the agenda. Having helped create the housing crisis by sitting on land without developing it and keeping prices artificially high by failing to build, the building industry must be wetting itself at the prospect of the profits it'll make out of all the new house building Labour proposes – just as it did in the 1960s, when it jerry built masses of social housing that later had to be demolished.

What are Lewisham Labour promising on housing then? Just picking out a few:

• Introduce ballots on any estate regeneration scheme that includes replacing existing homes and back this up with a Residents' Charter that guarantees all residents the right to remain on their estate, and which guarantees an increase in genuinely affordable housing.

Blimey, that's three bullet points in one, surely? First of all, what do they mean by "replacing existing homes"? Surely they mean "demolishing people's homes", don't they? Afraid to say the word? Afraid to admit the environmental impact and massive carbon footprint that word evokes? Say demolition, that's what you mean! The rest of this garbled statement indicates that ballots will be worded so unintelligibly that residents threatened with demolition will hardly know what they're voting for.

• Not sell strategic council land to private property developers
• Our target will be to achieve 50% genuinely affordable homes
• Publish all viability assessments so developers have to account to the public when they refuse to meet our target

This sounds good, but does it include Housing Associations (which are private until a change of government un-privatises them again)? And haven't they already sold off ALL the strategic land in Deptford to private developers (with council estates the only land left to redevelop)? Will the financial details of council-led partnerships with private developers be open to scrutiny? And are 'genuinely affordable homes' genuinely affordable?

Much of this is led by conditions of GLA grant funding it seems. But whatever now seems 'right' makes what has gone on previously look terribly 'wrong'. The new Mayor will still have to preside over the results of decisions made by the previous administration (when he was Cabinet Member for Housing and these rules did not apply). Or are they actually proud of schemes like Heathside & Lethbridge where 328 social tenants were forced out and took priority on the waiting list, pushing those already on it further down it, so that Family Mosaic could build 616 private homes?

• Build a new generation of council-owned homes for private rents providing long-term tenancies of up to 10 years with rent controls

This must refer to the mass of publicly owned land down in New Cross Gate at Besson Street. A great place to build new social homes, you'd think. But no, this is where Lewisham Labour has decided to enter the Private Rental Sector through a joint venture (50/50) with Grainger plc, "the UK's largest listed residential landlord”.

The deal is to build 232 units, of which 65% will be let at market rent levels, and 35% as Living Rents. None of the tenants will be drawn from the Council’s housing waiting list. Tenancies will be a minimum of 3 years and maximum of 10.

The Council call their "35%" of this development ‘affordable’, as that’s what the GLA call it. In fact Living Rent is one of three types of what the GLA call “genuinely affordable” homes. They describe the London Living Rent as "homes for middle-income households"not earning above £60k p/a and the rent depends on where you live. Lewisham Council, on the other hand, claims that “Living Rent” is linked to the London Living Wage. It assumes that two earners occupy each flat, each paying 35% of their net income on rent. 

In other words, it can only be described as affordable if you share a flat, which many people do of course. But if you're a single mum or dad, you won't be able to afford a two bed flat for you and your children on your Living Wage take home pay of £326p/w when the Lewisham benchmarked London Living Rent is £225.46. Nor will you be able to afford to sleep with the children in the same room when a one-bed flat is £202.85. This development's not for them. 

How did this get past Cllr Dromey who claims he refuses to support any scheme that does not include "genuinely" affordable housing? Especially when 65% of homes will be at market rent levels and all the cash is going to a private company? A tidy profit on public land for Grainger plc –who met the Council at a speed-dating developer event at the Shard in February 2017. How can Dromey ignore the angry locals who are disappointed that a site which originally contained council housing (demolished in 2007) is not providing any homes for social rent when the area has so many low-income people in need? 

Of course middle class or middle-income people need affordable homes too, but it's really annoying when your councillor votes to demolish people's homes and keeps banging on about building new social housing to get people off the waiting list. 

In the deal with Grainger PLC, the Council won’t be selling the land, but rather “investing” in it, and topping up its revenue with the rental income stream to fund services. Although they claim they don’t plan to try this elsewhere, the proposed partnership allows for a similar venture to happen on other sites without having to choose another business partner, so it’s probably a pilot project that may see more unaffordable housing on public land elsewhere in the borough. So much for that waiting list!

The idea of not selling off public land sounds good, but actually this kind of scheme is a bit alarming. Global corporate landlords and private equity have been waiting for opportunities like this – for state owned land to fall into private hands, ripe for the plucking. Such entities are already benefiting from tax exemptions facilitated by the Tory government's introduction of Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) where the biggest profits are currently being made in student accommodation, and purpose-built student housing REITs are now listed on the stock exchange. 

Perhaps Lewisham are partnering a REIT in their plans for Achilles Street in New Cross, where they want to demolish recently built student accommodation, 87 council homes and 15+ businesses in order to build 90 extra 'social' homes and a massive tower of new student accommodation. The options presented to residents were to 'do nothing', or 'retain existing homes and add 22 new ones on underused spaces', or 'comprehensively redevelop the area' (aka comprehensively demolish the area). Unfortunately for those whose homes and livelihoods are threatened and who haven't been able to make any plans for two years, the Council have made clear what their favoured option is (the latter) whilst also saying no decisions have been made and that all options are still being considered. This is your lovely Labour Council!

Another initiative the Tories came up with to feather their nests is Build To Rent, a current example of which is the two towers going up on Deptford Creekside by Essential Living. All homes to rent, financed by global fund managers M3. But private equity firms are all too lightly regulated and far less accountable to tenants, the parent company being off-shore and answerable to no one. With the growing privatisation of public housing and the recent shift towards renting because no one can afford to buy, such companies are poised for a take over of London's privatised 'affordable rent' stock. Regeneration of our housing estates where councils partner with massive private interests on public land could lead to the mass transfer of social and public housing to the private sector. Just like the NHS.

Academics have shown that the shortage of housing and corresponding boom in UK house prices and rents has been carefully prepared and legislated for over a number of years, and Labour have been complicit in it. As far back as 1998, New Labour's Urban Task Force led by architect Richard Rogers  embraced American ideas of gentrifying the inner cities by building on brownfield land in Towards an Urban Rennaissance. But it was Lord Adonis in 2015 who put the nail in the coffin, with City Villages: More Homes, Better Communities, which advocated building hundreds of new "city villages" on existing council estates because the boom in land and house prices would enable local authorities to leverage their land ownership in partnership with private and voluntary sector developers (who are now privatised). The Tories promptly redesignated council estates as 'brownfield'.

Lord Adonis’s 2015 report includes a paper by the outgoing Mayor of Lewisham Steve Bullock and the former Leader of the Council Barry Quirk. They allude to the “personal attachment and belonging – to a locality, to a place” and then go on to say “most of us will move home at some point as our personal circumstances change and develop”. Yes, but we are hopefully in charge of such choices. They conclude that “developing more urban villages within London over the next 10 years will not only give people more places in which to live, it will give them more homes in which they can build belonging.” Tell that to the people you want to forcibly removed from their homes who already belong!

When Cllr Dromey talks about the huge number of people desperate for affordable housing, he falls into the same trap as everyone else – that the only answer is to build more housing. But, as Architects for Social Housing (ASH) argue, the housing shortage in London is a crisis of affordability, not supply, and building more homes does not push house and rental prices down. Estate regeneration is not a solution – on the contrary, it is helping to produce the crisis: "The motivation for demolishing and redeveloping estates is not the housing of London's rising population at higher densities in more and better homes, but to provide investment opportunities for global capital and the enormous profits to be made from building high-value properties on some of the most valuable land in the world." 

ASH are particularly critical of Labour councils who present themselves as opposed to Tory attacks on social housing while they continue to demolish estates and claim refurbishment is financially 'unviable'. It is not just Tory policies such as Right To Buy, Housing Benefit capping, Help to Buy, Rent to Buy and the failure to regulate private developer's viability assessments that contribute to the lack of affordable homes, but also GLA grants to private Housing Associations to build affordable housing for private sale, local authority funding for estate regeneration schemes and the transfer of public land into private ownership. They're all privatisation schemes subsidised by the public purse. Will Labour want to stop it?

Tidemill and Reginald Road #3 - Deptford Husting

As mentioned in our previous post, residents at Reginald Road handed in yet another petition to the Council last week saying they don't want their homes demolished. They also asked the Council to stop harassing them. This obviously fell on deaf ears, as officers from the Housing Strategy team were back door knocking again within a few days. Not only that, but last week a tenant was told by Lewisham Homes that they would not carry out any repairs and she would have to fund them herself. 

Lewisham Labour pledge to introduce balloting of estates threatened with demolition in their new manifesto, which is too late for Reginald Road, although since the development hasn't been fully signed off yet there's no reason why it should be. Of course there's no guarantee the officers in charge of balloting won't use the same manipulative (and now bullying) techniques that they're employing now, and twist a majority ballot against demolition into 100% consent.

Meanwhile, at the Deptford Hustings held in Old Tidemill Garden last Sunday (watch a recording  here), Cllr Joe Dromey repeatedly referred to a young woman he'd met on his campaign door-knocking rounds who is in dire need of re-housing. He wouldn't say which estate she was from but kept referring to her like a mascot (or a trope for his election campaign). Because she had cried in his lap, he was personally guaranteeing she be rehoused.

In a perpetual state of campaigning, usually in support of Council policy that goes against his own constituents, in March he was on Facebook saying the same thing: "When we were door-knocking on the Winslade on Saturday, I met a woman who is living in a tiny studio apartment, riddled with damp, with her two kids. All of them suffer from mental health problems, and they were in a really bad way. I'm trying to get them moved, but we have so few social homes, and there is so much need. They deserve a decent home, and this new estate in Deptford will make an enormous difference."

Candidates Joe Dromey (Lab), Jerry Barnett (LibDem) and Andrea Carey-Fuller (Green) just before the Deptford Hustings started on Sunday

While we agree that it must be truly awful for the young mother he met, our first thought is that the Winslade estate is owned by the Council and managed by Lewisham Homes. If the property is 'damp riddled', whose fault is that? 

The Winslade has recently had "Decent Homes" work done, but as with most of the Lewisham Homes project-managed Decent Homes work done across the borough in the past few years, damp was never tackled; the work was based on desktop stock surveys done by Savills several years ago, with no attention paid to the issues in individual buildings. As Lewisham Homes tenants know full well, complaints about damp are rarely adequately dealt with and tenants are often told it is their own fault (for drying washing indoors for example), when more often than not it's the result of long term lack of repair to gutters, loose roof tiles or chimney flashing, faulty communal walkway surfaces, inadequate ventilation or a leaking boiler from another flat. After 12 years in existence, Lewisham Homes still does not have cyclical programmes in place to solve repetitive problems, and their repairs service can be summed up in short term fixes that lead to long term nightmares – yet they are now in charge of building new homes! 

Our second thought was "What about the people in Reginald House?!" who have been living with the threat of demolition for ten years – living in fear of displacement and unable to plan ahead – while Lewisham Council have faffed around trying to up affordable homes quotas, chopping and changing their minds, lying to residents, failing to communicate with them properly, trying to pick them off one-by-one, and not once considering the impact of their plans on people. 

In the early days of so-called 'consultation', Housing Strategy officers reported to Mayor & Cabinet that the scheme had lots of support and the only ones who didn't want the scheme to go ahead were older residents who'd been living there a long time. Well yes, what a surprise! Pesky old people – the ones most invested in their homes, with the most to lose! 

As one campaigner responded to Cllr Dromey on Facebook, "you are riding roughshod over one disadvantaged community to serve what you perceive as an even more disadvantaged community. It is divisive."

This news report from 2017 by East London Lines captures how people in Reginald House feel:

Stress, a sense of loss, grieving, poorer mental health and a decline in physical health have been found to occur in individuals who are forced from their homes. Stress can also occur from the anticipation of dislocation and the lack of understanding from the authorities. Qualitative studies in the US have found the sense of bereavement that comes from being displaced is particularly acute among the elderly. 

In her recent book about the "financialisation of housing" Big Capital–who is London for? Anna Minton documents, among other things, the effects of demolition and displacement on residents at the Heygate, where some people are thought to have died as a result of the upheaval.  

Academics refer to the 'phenomenology of place' to distinguish 'space' (ie a unit of housing) from 'place' (home). Both home and hometown are intimate places, full of memories, and to dismiss the 'emotional geography' of place simply reduces neighbourhood and home to a spatial commodity or just mere numbers. 

Lewisham Council are offering the Reginald House tenants new homes in the new development. "Look!" they say, "you'll have a lift, you'll have a brand new home!", but fail to see the difference between opening your front door to the outside world as you have done for years and opening your front door onto a corridor – let alone the extra costs incurred in service charges for maintaining a lift. Or the difference between knowing exactly where your neighbours are, then finding them transferred to a strange new block – or even another town.

At the Deptford Hustings Cllr Dromey (son of Harriet Harmen MP and Jack Dromey MP) accused members of the audience of "nimbyism" – he twice muttered under his breath "It's never here though, is it, it's always somewhere else" and "Never in this spot, though, is it" as if no one wanted to see new housing built. As we have previously noted, campaigners have shown it is possible to build more housing on the site without demolishing homes and the garden. So he obviously missed all the relevant points and insulted everyone in Reginald House at the same time (not that they were ever going to vote for him anyway)... 

Managed decline

The exterior of 2-16A Reginald Road has been allowed to become run-down (while the insides have benefitted from Decent Homes work) in what is usually referred to as "managed decline" – or deliberate neglect, as film-maker Paul Sng describes in his film Dispossession: The Great Social Housing Swindle. 

At Reginald Road, service charges and rent are being paid but no repair work is being done. It's not as though the money isn't there to refurbish homes, it's just being spent elsewhere. An FOI request revealed that in the time that £104,000 was taken from Reginald House residents in rent and service charges, only £126 has been spent on repairs.

At Achilles Street in New Cross where 87 homes and 15+ businesses are under threat of demolition in Council-led estate regeneration, the residents made an FOI request to find out whether any money was being spent on their buildings. They discovered that whilst £2,601,009 had been collected in rent and service charges in the past six years, only £248,899 had been spent on repairs and maintenance. 

The way Lewisham Homes is managing the Council's current stock leads one to suspect that the Winslade estate – where Cllr Dromey met the desperately unhappy mum – is next in line for demolition and "regeneration". Meanwhile, residents at Achilles Street refer to Lewisham Homes as "slum landlords". 

Demolition Deptford #1 : Tidemill update

We're long overdue to report what happened at the Planning meeting on 27 September. It was not a good outcome for Deptford. Yes, there will be new 'affordable' homes built, but at the expense of demolition of both valuable green space and a block of homes where none of the tenants want to move.

Before the meeting, protesters made their feelings known with placards, drums and chants outside the town hall. But once inside the council chamber, those who'd never attended a planning meeting before in their life were quite shocked to see what a flimsy relationship Lewisham strategic planning has with any notion of democracy.

For starters, only 6 out of 10 councillors serving on the Strategic Planning Committee were present, just one of them with extensive planning experience (housing overlord and new Mayor Damien Egan's campaign manager Kevin Bonavia). Quite astonishing for a major and controversial application that impacts so much on the area. See here for 'apologies' (sadly, Cllrs Hall and Curran amongst them).

You can read the minutes here, but here's an additional viewpoint:

Speaking against the application in the short time allowed (and with only one week's notice of the meeting) was a small group made up of the campaign co-ordinator from Deptford Neighbourhood Action (DNA), a resident of Frankham House, two residents from Reginald Road, as well as GLA Assembly member for Greenwich & Lewisham, Len Duvall.

Speaking for the applicant were a 4-person team from Family Mosaic, supported by the Council's Strategic Housing team (remember, this is a Council-led scheme).

Not one representative from the development partner, Sherrygreen Homes, who stand to make such a huge profit out of building the scheme, selling off the private housing, was available to speak. The committee was presented with a cuddly, supposedly ethical housing association applicant, with no mention or sign of the hefty and unnecessary price Lewisham will have to pay to see its scheme proceed.

It was quietly revealed that Family Mosaic had ONLY JUST managed to secure the affordable element of the scheme by "merging" with Peabody Housing Association, a process that had started in December 2016 and completed in July 2017 – a cynical move that gave Family Mosaic access to the GLA grant funding it needed to fund the 'affordable' element on this site, without which the scheme would have collapsed. (And which enables Sherrygreen Homes to continue to make well over 20% in profits).

Perhaps unsurprisingly, with the Council's ambitions and reputation riding so much on a scheme that has been planned for ten years or more, there was some heavy mis-direction from the Head of Planning Emma Talbot and also the Chair Amanda De Ryk. For instance, it was implied that work could not go ahead on the sister scheme at Amersham Vale until this application was approved.

The Council's Strategic Housing team claimed they had consulted fully with the tenants of Reginald House and with the Old Tidemill Garden team. Speaking for the garden, the campaigners countered that the Council's position had not changed at all since the deferral last year. The Chair made much of the fact that Len Duvall had chaired the meetings as if to imply everything had operated democratically.

The fact that nothing about those meetings was democratic was not examined. There had been two meetings of note: one in which how the garden team should fuck off somewhere else (but nowhere else could be found); the other in which all the ideas from Tidemill Garden were incorporated into a slim strip of land like a sort of Disney Tidemill on a very small scale.

When the Housing Team claimed a letter had gone out only the previous week to tenants at Reginald Road explaining all the terms of their re-housing on the new site, elderly resident Pauline stood up from the audience with her hand held up to request to speak.

She was told to sit down by the Chair but members of the audience murmured her concerns – she had not received the letter. Councillors fussed over whether letters had been sent as 'signed on delivery'; the Housing Team admitted they had not and there was no proof letters had been sent. Nevertheless, the lie remained, unexamined any further.

Under "standing orders" (in which Councillors who are not members of the committee are allowed to speak) New Cross Councillor Brenda Dacres said that the Amersham Vale development was being "held to ransom" and there was no reason why it could not go ahead while the Tidemill site was reviewed. (Brenda has been supportive of the campaign against demolition of both the garden and Reginald Road homes, and pointed out that the new Tidemill school had no garden and had been using the old garden).

According to the rules, anything that Councillors say "under standing orders" is not supposed to influence the decision "in any capacity". So it would follow that Brenda's support should not influence Councillors.

Meanwhile, Cllr Joe Dromey sneaked into the meeting late (having arranged with the Chair for "standing orders" to be postponed until he got there because he'd been at another meeting), and spoke fully in favour of the development.

Note: As soon as Dromey was elected he was appointed to Mayor & Cabinet (his mum is Harriet Harman, his dad is Jack Dromey). No one in the Mayor & Cabinet seems capable of speaking against Mayor & Cabinet decisions (tho Joe insists he voted against the Millwall CPO). The committee wouldn't be influenced, right?

Dromey hadn't even been there to listen to the residents (his parishioners) speak about how they didn't want their homes demolished and how they hadn't been properly consulted or kept informed of what was going on. He's probably not sure where it is.

It's unfortunate for Deptford that two of its Councillors are part of the elite status quo (Mayor & Cabinet – the other being Paul Maslin) that controls everything in Lewisham, including the constituency Labour Party, and has so little regard for what happens locally.

The Chair (Amanda De Ryk, now known locally as Amanda 3rd Reich) ruled against any question of the committee looking at the possibility of the scheme being redesigned (as requested by Deptford Neighbourhood Action and Cllr Brenda Dacres) or examining the contractual arrangements with Amersham Vale that were supposedly holding up the sister project. Apparently, these nuanced aspects were strictly "not under consideration for this application". Nothing at all, in other words, was relevant for consideration except the improvement in affordable housing – which had only been achieved at the last minute by Family Mosaic doing a deal with Peabody.

It was Cllr Bonavia who swayed the vote, head in hands, pretending to find it a difficult decision to demolish a precious green space and 16 flats (even though his career depends on towing the party line in Lewisham in support of Damien Egan – new housing at any cost). The fact that he'd been told that only one resident in Reginald Road had shown support for their home being demolished seemed to be irrelevant.

Cllrs Suzannah Clark (Labour) and John Coughlin (Green) were the only ones brave enough to vote against. So the application was passed 4 to 2 (or 4 out of 10).

Note: NOTHING from Lewisham Homes on this matter. No defence of its tenants, no comment about how they chose not to use Decent Homes money to refurbish the outside of 2-17 Reginald Road (not that a refurbishment by Lewisham Homes' contractor MITIE would have inspired confidence since everything they did was awful and still in dispute). Happy to unload care of its stock onto Family Mosaic Peabody. Also too excited about being in charge of "infills" on estates in its care to understand what it means for its tenants to become part of a building site.

Ironically, on the very same night Jeremy Corbyn made his closing speech at the Labour conference; here's what he said about Labour's new policies on housing:



"Councils will have to win a ballot of existing tenants and leaseholders before any redevelopment scheme can take place."

Clapped by everyone, but obviously not a policy backed by Lewisham nor any other Labour borough currently engaging in regeneration of its own land and properties by selling off land at cut price and demolishing buildings they could have refurbished.

This led to the left in the local Labour Party tabling a motion (carried overwhelmingly, apparently) to ask Sadiq Khan call in the decision on Tidemill. The GLA have to review the application anyway – the question is whether enough social housing is being achieved, considering how cheaply the new owners are getting the land for (in Tidemill's case, a fraction of what Family Mosaic Peabody have paid for private land elsewhere in Deptford – e.g. Sun Wharf).

See also this new piece in The Independent that includes Reginald Road, questioning why Labour Councils feature so prominently in regeneration schemes where tenants don't get a say. "...they are opposed to giving residents ballots because it doesn't fit in with their paternalistic attitude or their culture of having absolute control. They have a big plan and they won't listen to any alternatives" (Sian Berry). 

Meanwhile, the Tidemill Garden campaigners have also written to the Mayor of London asking him to call it in, appealing to the loss of green space, especially when he has just launched the Greener Cities programme, hoping to make London the first National Park City, and has Tidemill as the first example of good practice.

An update by Old Tidemill Garden is also available here.

Also, all this this is about to happen on a bigger scale at Achilles Street in New Cross, with four blocks and several businesses at stake. Another great idea from Lewisham Planning Central that has no regard for the people living or working in the buildings it appropriates (and demolishes) in its grand plan (that ultimately makes loads of money for a developer).

(Post edited and updated 3 Nov 2017)