Another reason why building takes ages in London/UK. Tower Hamlets councillor blocks a decision on approving a new student accomodation tower until they can look at the location first. All councilors were already invited to look 2 weeks ago but none replied.
by JBWalker1
20 comments
I swear to god, this country needs less red tape. And a lot of these councilors are muppets.
I’m going to go out on a limb and say this is more specifically a Tower Hamlets council, more specifically this particular Tower Hamlets council problem.
That’s not to say it’s not a problem in London.
It’s to say that Tower Hamlets are a band of thieving layabouts.
It’s a tower surrounded by other towers. It’s clearly not out of place or setting a new precedent. This red tape just costs everyone in the end.
Just saw this about a planning approval meeting last night which is quite annoying. A new student tower has been planned in Wood Wharf. Wood Wharf is the big new Canary Wharf district builg built now with a load of residential towers and a bunch of new office towers too. The planning application was submitted a very long time ago and the idea of a student tower there has been planned and appoved even longer ago. The planning officers went through it all and recommended councillors to approve it last night and…. they didn’t for pretty dumb and uninformed reasons. This might set it back another month which might not sound like much but it’s another month on top of all previous months. And if all the buildings in the new district has a month extra then thats years of delays overall just because of councillors not informing themselves.
As usual the application contains huge amount of information on any possible concern and even includes responses from entities such as the police, fire brigade, and TfL. All the concerns the councillors who rejected the proposal bought up have been addressed in the application but they can seemingly turn up and get to decide if this probably £1bn tower gets built without even skimming through the application.
You can watch the meeting here – https://towerhamlets.public-i.tv/core/portal/webcast_interactive/873183/start_time/0
1:09:36 is the time Cllr Kamrul Hussain says they should defer the approval for another time so they can go to the location first and make a more informed decision. 2 mins later is when they’re replied to pointing out that they were already invited to go to the location beforehand.
edit: The vote was 4 for and 4 against and the chair decided to go with the defer side. So not all of them are holding things back. I didn’t look into who voted which way but looking at the 2 Labour councillors behaviour I’m gonna assume they were 2 on the approve side and it’s the Aspire party councillors who voted to defer this decision.
Dont vote Aspire.
Friendly reminder that TH Council has more cab drivers than it has women in its cabinet.
What do the councillors even know about construction? How is viewing in person going to help at all when these men may not even know how to build a fence?
Student accommodation – developers talk for ‘a way to get around the social housing requirement’.
How the heck could it be blocked if they were invited to visit previously and didn’t show up. How does this work?
To get anything done in Tower Hamlets you need to be firing out the brown envelopes
TH council is corrupt, incompetent and rotten to the core since Aspire and Lutfur Rahman got back in.
Sack the lot of them and hire somebody with a brain.
It’s Tower Hamlets, if ever there was a council that should be put into the equivalent of Special Measures it’s this one.
Canary Wharf should just secede from Tower Hamlets tbh. I can’t imagine how infuriating it must be to hampered by fucking idiots all the time.
This sub seems to really like boosting shitty corporate restaurants and cry that we can’t build more shitty corporate towers.
I thought it’d be a bit more punk around here!
I’m going to go out on a limb and say that almost all councils in London are fighting against the scourge of luxury residential student towers.
Developers build these because units can be much smaller than regular apartments, but landlords can still charge a premium to predominantly international students. As you know, the council can’t collect any council tax from these students so they are essentially draining local resources.
Since 2020, 1/3 of major student housing schemes already had existing planning permission for regular housing for locals.
It doesn’t help that many Unis have a London campus to appeal to these International students. University of West Scotland, ranked as the second worst University in the UK, has thousands of predominantly international students in London…
Councils shouldn’t have planning powers. Strip it from them and give it to the mayor.
You look at any economic strategy or housing strategy from the mayor or the boroughs and it’s all “more money for affordable housing pllleeaaasssee” not even a fucking hint of planning reforms and more permissive planning despite not hitting housing targets in decades.
I pray to God that the labour government tests up the planning system because local government is completely inept and incapable or delivering improvement on housing
Who needs more expensive, likely private student accommodation anyway? This is hardly going to solve the housing crisis, will just be a cash cow to get money from rich international students.
This is the second time in a row they’ve done this as well. Last planning meeting it was about the Whitechapel life sciences development.
Why are they building student accommodation there? Is it near a University?
I did read a few months ago that Student accomodation blocks can be built with smaller footprint apartments and less social provisions taken into consideration by the developers. Then a few years later they can flip the block from student accomodation to private rental.
Apparently it’s a bit of a loophole and this block seems to be exactly one of them.
That’s not just a london thing, that’s every council where a councillor is invited to consult/discuss a project. Never turn up and then scream bloody murder why it wasn’t completed yesterday
Obviously this will upset the usual anti tower hamlets types but they are already building student housing for 1700 students on the old McDonald’s site on Trafalgar Way:
https://www.rlb.com/europe/projects/2-trafalgar-way/
So it makes sense to question more being added so close by.
Unfortunately none of the councillors seem to know that and a site visit is pointless because it’s a building site surrounded by building sites.
I assume there’s some resident push back from the Marina residents.
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