Following over an hour of discussion last week, Wandsworth’s Planning Application Committee retrospectively refused Watkin Jones’s Booker site in Nine Elms. The days of supporting development are over in Wandsworth. This follows the refusal of a 50% affordable housing proposal at Springfield Hospital promoted by Barratts last year.
The Officers at Wandsworth must be pretty depressed. To my eye, they had done a good job. Watkin Jones must also be pretty fed up too, their offer of a student led development with onsite affordable – 55 C3 homes including 27 social rent and 237 affordable student beds would have been a good outcome for a Borough which has stopped building.
Politically, Wandsworth has never been a huge fan of student accommodation and aside from Roehampton University at the other end of the Borough, there is no major institution housed in the Borough. That of course means the relationship between town and gown is a little less established. Unlike other Boroughs who benefit from more established working relationships between unis and their respective communities, there isn’t an effective voice for university interests in the northern part of Wandsworth.
London Plan policy rightly takes a London approach. The Nine Elms is a central London location and with two brand spanking new stations feeding it into the network, it is an attractive place for student accommodation that can serve any one of a number of central institutions. However, that is not how Wandsworth Members see things.
There was an hour plus discussion, triggered by the developer deciding to appeal for non-determination (they had submitted in May 2022). The site already had a resi consent which was pretty tall but that didn’t stop all sorts of weird and wonderful points being made.
One Councillor thought the bike storage was too hostile (welcome to planning and cycles). Another opined that decision making needed to be weighted towards pram generation (never mind the 55 affordable homes).
At no point did anyone mention the major economic housing crisis effecting city residential development or the fact that starts are falling off a cliff and the sector is in freefall cutting jobs and therefore capacity. The planning polity just doesn’t accept that the regulations they are working to are not fit for purpose or that anything has changed since the pandemic. Decisions such as this add to the perception that density driven development is too risky for large capital investment.
To appeal the developer will go and probably a positive outcome. You feel for the Officers who worked hard on this. You can see why the planning profession is not much fun and struggles to attract talent. The system grind is too much and we are all poorer for it.
