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/

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". 

Tidemill & Reginald House update #2 – affordable rents and alternative plans

Following on from our previous post, we wanted to take a further look at that 'key decision' made by Mayor & Cabinet on March 15th 2018: "to change 43 homes from private sale to London Affordable Rent (social rent)" and Cllr Dromey's claim that there will be 117 "socially rented" homes on the new Tidemill development.

There seems to be some confusion. The minutes have "social rent" in brackets after "London Affordable Rent", but the two are not the same. For verification, we asked a friendly councillor in another ward to find out for us and he came back with the following from the Head of Housing Policy (our bold):

‘Social Rent’ and ‘London Affordable Rent’ are both considered types of affordable housing and have very similar rent levels, however they are not the same product.

Properties let at ‘Social Rent’ have long been the most affordable housing product available, typically known as council housing. These properties are allocated to applicants in priority need who apply and are accepted to Lewisham’s Housing Register. The formula for calculating the rents is set by Government and since 2016, rents have been subject to a 1% rent reduction, to last until 2020, when the intention is to return to CPI plus 1% rent rises. 

The Mayor of London introduced ‘London Affordable Rent’ in 2017. London Affordable Rent refers to rents for genuinely affordable homes aimed at low-income households. The benchmark rents have been set by the Mayor and are very similar to social rents. As with social rents, ‘London Affordable Rent’ will also be subject to rent setting guidance and the 1% rent reduction will apply until 2020. Allocations to these properties will be made in the same way as social rent properties mentioned above.

‘London Affordable Rent’ can be confused with ‘Affordable Rent’ which the Government introduced as a form of affordable housing in 2010. The ‘Affordable Rent’ product allows Registered Providers to charge rents of up to 80% of local market rents. Rents at this level are rarely affordable to residents on low incomes and the product is considered to be widely unaffordable in London; thus it is not supported by the Mayor of London. Allocations to ‘Affordable Rent’ properties are also made via the Housing Register, but there is a reliance on Housing Benefit to meet the high cost of the rent.

Finally, ‘London Living Rent’ is a rent which is affordable to households on median incomes, as the rent is set at one third of median local incomes. It is a form of intermediate housing and is aimed at low to median earning working households who are priced out of home ownership and yet have no realistic opportunity to qualify for social housing. A number of the properties at Besson Street will be let at ‘London Living Rent’ levels, offering a range of ways of meeting a genuine housing need in Lewisham. They will enable lower income workers to benefit from lower rents and greater security, and will be priced at a level that means the group of potential beneficiaries is very broad.

Going forwards, homes built using GLA funding in the Affordable Housing Programme 2016-21 are expected to include properties for ‘London Affordable Rent’ and properties for ‘London Living Rent’. 

A rent comparison table was included with the explanation (prices per week) as follows:

Click to enlarge

What is clear from the table is that "London Affordable Rent" is not at all similar to "social rent" (here described as 'Lewisham Stock – Average Rent'). In fact, London Affordable Rent is 63% more than Social Rent (based on a 2-bed flat), and would cost the tenant an extra £3,000 per year. 

Click to enlarge

Although the terms offered to Reginald Road residents may now be to keep them at the same rent levels (real Social Rent/Council rent) how are we supposed to believe Joe when he says all the Tidemill "affordable" rents will be "social rents" if the Council considers the two different rents as "similar" (when they quite clearly are not), and when the development is dependent on GLA funding which is offered only for London Affordable Rents?

We finally managed to get hold of the report for the 15th March Mayor & Cabinet meeting, but all figures are redacted. Nevertheless it refers to how in 2017, the GLA's "new London Affordable Rent model clarified the rent setting process and created rents that were effectively social rents" (p.6). Then in 2018 (p.7) para 5.5 states "...This new offer would increase the proportion of new homes on the development that are affordable – defined as either London Affordable Rent (i.e. social rent) or as Shared Ownership...".

Cllr Dromey is utterly convinced that the rents will be "social rent" and seems to truly believe they will be the same as Council Rents – which actually are genuinely affordable for people on low incomes. For those earning the London Living Wage (£10.20p/h) whose annual salary might be £19,890, they would take home around £326 p/w after tax and national insurance, so the "affordable rent" of £144.25 p/w for a one-bed flat is actually, at 44%, far more than a third of their wages.

Most people on the housing waiting list that Cllr Dromey says will get homes in this new development will be earning £20k or much less. But if he is using the Tory re-definition of social rent as London Affordable Rent (as the Council seem to) then he has either fooled himself or is fooling us.

Alternative plans

We hope Joe is right, because there is a lot of sacrifice involved in this scheme as it stands now with families being forced from their homes and loss of pollution-mitigating mature green space.

However, those sacrifices need not be made if this development was redesigned with the same amount of units without demolishing valuable green space and sixteen sound council homes. The campaigners have already demonstrated to the Council how this might be done, with an alternative plan that shows denser building on the northern side of the site, saving both 2-30A Reginald Road and the garden.

Click to enlarge

But there was a flat refusal from the Council and its partners to work with local stakeholders (aka the community) to reconsider the layout of the site (which was set in stone four years ago when the contractual agreement stipulated that any redesign would have to come out of the partners' pockets).

Architects for Social Housing got the same response from Lambeth Council after working with residents for a year at Central Hill Estate to show how new homes could be added (infill) and the older ones refurbished without demolishing them. Lambeth said the fully budgeted ASH plan was "unviable", despite it costing less. The decision was based on a feasibility study that was only made available to ASH with all the figures redacted; Lambeth refused to give the financial reasons for why they'd rejected the proposals. 

One of the reasons the ASH plans actually cost less was because it costs £50k per unit to demolish the buildings (and then the cost of rebuilding) whereas refurbishment cost £40k per unit (with no rebuilding costs)!

And that's without taking into account the environmental impact and carbon footprint of demolition and new construction, or the emotional and mental health impacts on those whose homes are demolished.

Tidemill and Reginald House update #1 – secrecy and lies

On March 15th, Lewisham's Mayor & Cabinet met in secret to approve further plans for the redevelopment of the Tidemill site that includes the demolition of Old Tidemill Garden and 16 council flats at 2-30A Reginald Road. This was one of two agenda items discussed behind closed doors that night (the other being their plans for Besson Street) due to "commercial sensitivity". While campaigners protested outside the town hall, Cllr Joe Dromey (New Cross ward councillor and  Cabinet member for Policy & Performance) tweeted the outcome of the Tidemill item:

“Great Lewisham Council meeting this eve. Delighted we’ve been able to increase the number of social homes at the Old Tidemill development. It’s now 54% social housing, and 75% affordable. There will now be 117 socially rented homes on the new estate, an increase of 104 social homes. I think that’s the largest amount of social homes delivered in any development in the four years I’ve been a Councillor.” 

While Joe's figures are a little inaccurate (see below) he's right to say it's the largest amount of social homes delivered in any development in the past four years, including any council-led schemes. For example, at Heathside & Lethbridge, the council-led "regeneration scheme" at Blackheath Hill/Lewisham Road, the two estates combined originally consisted of 638 flats (527 on social rents and 111 leaseholders). The Council estimated it would cost £29.3m to do a high quality refurbishment (beyond Decent Homes standards) on all the blocks.

But instead they chose to partner with Family Mosaic housing association to demolish all the blocks and build 1192 new flats at a cost of £272m. According to figures provided by G15 (the group representing London's largest housing associations), at completion of the phased redevelopment in 2020, only 17% will be 'social rents' (199). 21% (248) will be 'affordable rent', 11% shared ownership/equity, and a whopping 52% (616) will be for private sale. This represents a loss of 328 'social rents' – and decanted tenants take priority on the Council's waiting list, depriving others on the list.

So, there certainly a need for some rebalancing! Meanwhile, with no further info than Joe's tweets to go on, the Deptford Dame was able to report four days later that the Council had published some very short minutes of the key decision made on Tidemill (which can also be found here – look for Deptford Southern Housing Sites):

“to increase the amount of affordable housing through increased grant funding, to change 43 homes from private sale to London Affordable Rent (social rent) at a cost to the Council of £4,310,211, and 16 homes from private sale to shared ownership at no additional cost”.

That's more or less it. But let's go back to Joe's figures. If you add 43 additional London Affordable Rents to the original 61 (74 new builds minus 13 demolished tenanted homes) you get 104, as Joe said. But this is not 54%, it is under 50% (of the total 209 units). And if you add 16 additional ‘shared ownership homes’ to the original 22 (25 new builds minus 3 demolished leaseholder homes), you get 38. 104+38 = 142, which is not a 75% total of affordable housing. It is under 68%.  

Never mind, it's a great improvement on the previous quota (8% in 2016 and 41% in 2017) and in fact is well over the 50% required by the GLA to grant funding (at around £60k per affordable flat). Trebles all round. In fact, if there's that much subsidy sloshing about and quite a lot of it coming from the Council itself in previously unused Right To Buy receipts as well as selling the land at "less than best consideration" (actually about 25% of what Family Mosaic paid for its site at Sun Wharf), then why it is still necessary to DEMOLISH 16 HOMES and a much needed mature green space, when no one who actually lives here wants that?

The residents at Reginald Road certainly don't want it, but does anyone listen to them? They have been living with the threat of demolition since 2008 and have several times petitioned against the demolition of their homes. The latest petition was handed in to Lewisham on April 24th and was signed by 12 out of 15 residents (there are 16 homes, but one is presently empty).

Not only have the residents declared several times that they want to keep their homes, but the plans involve a stock transfer (from Lewisham Homes to a housing association), which by law, requires a ballot. Like Heathside & Lethbridge and others, they have never been offered one. Lewisham get round this by offering tenants rehousing in Council property in other parts of the borough if they don't want to move to a new housing association flat.

The Mayor of London (along with Lewisham's Mayor-in-waiting) is now proposing mandatory ballots of residents for schemes where any demolition is planned, as a strict condition of any GLA funding. Soon after consultation on the policy began, Sian Berry (London Assembly member for the Green Party) discovered that the Mayor of London had already signed off funding for 34 estates to dodge his own new ballot rules. Unfortunately, Tidemill is on that list because the GLA signed a contract for funding in January, despite not yet having approved the planning application in full.

We put in an FOI request to see the officer's report that led to the key decision made on 15th March behind closed doors. The answer is as expected – the Council are not required to oblige the request. This is because they are partnering with private companies – Peabody Housing, Sherrygreen Homes and Mullaley – who are not public bodies. This confidentiality applies to any regeneration scheme where Lewisham partners with housing associations and private builders.

Architects for Social Housing (ASH) spent over three years trying to obtain figures from Lambeth Council via FOI when working on alternative community-led plans for the Central Hill Estate in Crystal Palace. They concluded: "The desire of the private sector development partners to hide such information…should be an argument in favour of disclosure in any proposed housing development – let alone one based on the demolition and privatisation of publicly owned assets; let alone one that will receive millions of pounds of public funding…"

They go on, "In the wake of Grenfell, how can any council continue to hide its financial deals with private sector partners behind the cloak of commercial confidentiality?... Who can deny that it is not in the public interest to know the corners being cut by the kind of private deals that made the Grenfell Tower fire a disaster waiting to happen, when those same deals are being withheld from public scrutiny on every estate regeneration scheme that demolishes council homes and replaces them with developments built and managed by private companies?”

Housing associations are private companies. Even the Mayor of London says in the draft new London Plan (para 4.10.5): “Given the impact of estate regeneration schemes on existing residents, it is particularly important that information about the viability of schemes is available to the public even where a high level of affordable housing is being delivered.”

Surely £4+m of public money and the sale of public assets to a private company demands full transparency?

Reginald Road & Achilles Street – trying to be heard and seen

At the Birds Nest roundabout

We first noticed this banner at the Birds Nest roundabout on Sunday 28th January, but it was apparently one of five that went up around Deptford on Friday evening.

Protesters were trying to highlight the plight of Council tenants whose homes (and businesses) are due for demolition to make way for new developments planned by Lewisham Council. Publicly owned green space (Tidemill Old Wildlife Garden) will also be lost. The Council defends its policy of demolition on the basis that more social housing can be built in its place as a result of it partnering with private developers who will of course build even more private housing as well. Never mind that the tenants themselves do not want their homes demolished.

On the overpass at Deptford Bridge DLR

Such deals are common across London Labour boroughs, the most controversial being the Heygate and Aylesbury estate regenerations in Southwark where very little social if any housing has been achieved and so many people have been displaced. The most recent controversy is the Haringey Development Vehicle (HDV) which has resulted in the leader of Haringey Labour resigning after Councillors who supported the plan to go 50/50 with Lend Lease were voted out in local elections to be replaced with new Councillors who opposed the plan.

At Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Reginald Road

We've covered the Tidemill and Reginald Road story quite a lot on this blog, the last post being an overdue report in November on the September planning decision, surely one of the most undemocratic planning meetings in the present administration's history.

We also caught up in November with what is going on at Achilles Street in New Cross – just the other side of the underpass. Tenants and leaseholders as well as businesses are fighting to save their homes, shops and restaurants, while the Council drags its heels on its plans – without giving any indication that they will change them in any way. As with Tidemill (where the publicly funded subsidy for the affordable housing was not secured till the very last minute) such delays are usually due to the Council finding suitable development partners.

Fordham Park end of the New Cross underpass

Fortunately, another writer is keeping us to date with what is going on at Reginald Road and Achilles Street. PHD student Anita Strasser has just posted on her blog Deptford Is Changing. She notes how tenants' mental health is affected when they have no control over their own futures, and how (often family-run) shops and businesses risk losing their livelihoods. The Council refuses to ballot those affected.

Deptford end of the underpass

The banners remind us of how difficult it is for ordinary people's voices to be heard. A recent YouGov poll found that 71% feel they have no control over the important decisions that affect their neighbourhood and local community.

The campaign to bring back the Deptford Anchor is being hailed by some as a triumph of "People Power", but people's lives were not affected or put on hold while the Council took almost five years to capitulate to the campaigner's wishes. Reginald Road tenants have been living in limbo for almost ten years since regeneration plans for Tidemill were first mooted. Tenants and businesses affected by threats of demolition cannot afford the luxury of waiting so long to find out their fate.

https://www.facebook.com/nosocialcleansinglewisham/
https://www.facebook.com/oldtidemillgarden/?ref=br_rs
https://achillesstreetstopandlisten.wordpress.com
https://achillesstreetstopandlisten.wordpress.com/2017/07/12/fact-sheet/
http://www.eastlondonlines.co.uk/2017/12/lewisham-residents-fighting-save-homes-demolition-accuse-council-social-cleansing/

Demolition Deptford #2 : events on November 5th & 12th

Bonfire Night Event
Sunday 5th November, 4–8pm
Old Tidemill Garden. FREE

For those interested in the ongoing campaign to save Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden and 2-30a Reginald Road (the block of flats next to it), there's an opportunity to enjoy an evening in the garden while it still exists. There'll be food and hot beverages available. Bring along an instrument and/or songs to share for a musical jam around the campfire.

No Social Cleansing in Lewisham Benefit
Sunday 12th November, 6–11pm
Bird's Nest pub. FREE

Since the Tidemill application went through, the Old Tidemill Garden volunteers have been joining up with other campaigners in the area. This event brings them all together in a fundraiser, with the organisers (The Four Fathers) identifying the most pressing issues as:
– Planned destruction of Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden and 2-30a Reginald Road
– Proposed destruction of social housing and shops around Achilles Street in New Cross
– Proposed destruction of green space to build high rise development at No.1 Creekside
– Proposed clearing of boat dwellers on Creek at No.2 Creekside to make way for 'box park' and later development.

On the bill:
Potent Whisper - razor-sharp political spoken word artist
https://www.facebook.com/PotentWhisper/
The Four Fathers - militant rock and roots reggae
https://www.facebook.com/fourfatherslondon/
The Commie Faggots - theatrical singalong politics
https://www.facebook.com/c0mmiefagg0ts/
Asher Baker - Southwark-based rapper
https://www.facebook.com/asherjbaker/
The Wiz-RD - teenage beatbox poet
https://www.facebook.com/The-Wiz-RD-1757117781200290/
Ukadelix - local ukulele group
https://www.facebook.com/ukadelix/

Deptford Demolition: Tidemill in Planning again

The Tidemill scheme is up again before the Strategic Planning Committee this Wednesday 27th September, 7.30pm at the Civic Suite, Lewisham Town Hall, Catford. 

Local campaigners are hoping supporters will join them outside the town hall at 6.30pm "to demonstrate the strength of opposition to these plans".

It’s likely to be a lively meeting, so if you’re free, please show up and lend your support by filling the Council Chamber with your opposition – or even sceptical amusement and horror, as the planning process is probably one of the best examples of democracy gone wrong that exists close to home. If the decision goes against him, he can appeal knowing the Council does not have the legal resources to fight it. Oh, hang on, this is a Council-led scheme! It would be a brave Councillor who opposes it in favour of the community! Not many of those about.

This is about the Planning Application TO DEMOLISH: 

– the council block at 2-30A Reginald Road

– 74 mature trees and the entire Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden 

– the former caretaker’s house on Frankham Street (which should be a heritage asset as part of the old school)

All in order to construct 209 new flats. Nothing wrong with building new homes, you might think, but at what cost? There could be another way, but architects Pollard Thomas Edwards couldn't find one, because the brief they were given by the Council didn't allow them to. Their job was to satisfy the planners' and developers' brief and no one else's.

One of the main constraints was how high they could go. 6 storeys is probably too high for the area, but when it's at the expense of green space, maybe they could go a bit higher near to the high street? The Deptford Project by the high street went to 8 storeys, no problem, in a Conservation Area. So what about the top left corner on this site near the high street, where valuable parking space is being removed – couldn't that go higher? 

The plans for Tidemill were drawn up in 2015 but were set in stone much earlier. Meanwhile, there is now a new development popping up at No.1 Creekside more or less opposite this scheme. It's not as though the Planners don't know about it, they went on to GIVE AWAY yet more green space to it. It wants to be 12 storeys high and surely affects what could happen on the Tidemill site. (More on No.1 soon).

The Tidemill scheme was deferred by the Strategic Planning Committee last September, mainly because the developer was not offering the affordable housing he promised. But the GLA have recently stepped in at the last minute with a huge subsidy, so that part of the problem has now been sorted (at our expense, whilst maintaining the developer’s profits at well over 20%). 

The scheme will now achieve about 41% affordable housing, but only a tiny number of socially rented homes. With 59% more private housing being built, the percentage of affordable housing in the borough (and certainly social housing) will increase in deficit. 

To top all that, the land is being sold at less than half price. Lewisham is practically giving it away. (Again, at our expense, whilst maintaining an inflated profit for the developer). We wrote about this in more detail in March 2017.

The other issues for deferral still remain: Right to Light for existing residents in Frankham House and Reginald Road; allocation of amenity spaces (too many private and gated gardens and loss of the Tidemill Wildlife Garden); and concern for the tenants in the council block to be demolished and how they will be reallocated (e.g. their transfer to a housing association with no like-for-like accommodation or secure tenancies).... 

There have been no improvements to these issues after a year. Council officers and the developers insist they have consulted with the residents of 2-30A Reginald Road (but they haven't, and the tenants and leaseholders still don't want to leave their homes). They have had meetings with the garden team but the meetings have been farcical, with north London landscape architects BDP attempting to mimic the features of a mature Tidemill garden into small pocket gardens because the developer and Council would not shift on the building layouts. 

The Council's argument against the garden was that it was only ever 'meantime' use, but the campaigners argue that: 

• It (literally) grew out of a highly successful publicly funded collaborative project in the late 1990s between the old Tidemill School (its children, parents and teachers) and local organisation Deptford Discovery Project working with government-backed green space innovators and facilitators, Groundwork UK, with assistance from Mowlem (who were building the DLR at that time) and supported by Lewisham Council. The most important aspect of it was the contribution the children made to it. Leader of the Council and subsequent Mayor, Dave Sullivan opened it. It seems Lewisham can't remember or celebrate its own achievements.

• In its recent incarnation managed by Assembly, the garden has been cited by the GLA as a celebrated case study in its newly launched Greener City Fund (August 2017). See https://www.london.gov.uk/sites/default/files/greener_city_fund_prospectus.pdf

• The garden can cater for children and adults alike to explore nature, wildlife, gardening and growing, in a safe space on their doorstep. It did this when it was part of the school, it did this when Assembly took it on, and it can do it again. It is not a "useless brownfield site", as described by the Council. 

• The tree canopy currently protects the high street from up to 50% of the pollution created by traffic in Deptford Church Street. The Nitrogen Dioxide (NO2) readings in the garden and near the high street are 30 micrograms per cubic metre, as opposed to 62 at the Bird's Nest pub (the legal EU limit being 40). 'Particulate matter' readings taken by Goldsmiths academics, Citizen Sense, also tend to back up this theory (though we'll have to wait another two months for their data to be published).

Old Tidemill Garden 20th Anniversary event this Sunday

Campaigners for the retention of the Old Tidemill Garden intended to celebrate the garden's 20th birthday in July, but the event was postponed at the last minute due to a day of torrential rain! Join them instead this Sunday 17th from 2pm.

See our previous post for more information on the campaign and how the garden came to be created 20 years ago.

This event is scaled down in size and ambition from the original, but still offers the opportunity for young and old to enjoy this beautiful secret green space. There's an emphasis on participatory music making later in the day and you're invited to bring your own picnic and musical instruments – so join in or just enjoy the vibes. Rain, rain, stay away!