THE HEYGATE ESTATE IN 1975

Much has happened in our much needed 3 month absence from posting anything on Southwark Notes. We are in the process of writing a series of posts of everything going on since the Heygate Phase One Planning Permission was granted in February. But for now, we are happy to present 4 images taken on a walkabout the Elephant by J. David Hulchanski in 1975. He has kindly given us permission to reproduce these photos for your delight and we very much appreciate such sharing. As you can see in the pics the estate was less than one year old in 1975. The underpass beneath Heygate St was still there and there was a large football pitch in the middle of the estate. The trees that now form such a fantastic urban forest are starting their lives here as tiddlers!

UNION ST TRADERS THREATENED TO BE THROWN OUT BY REGENERATION

Support the Union St local traders who have been stiffed by Network Rail after years of building up their small businesses!

Such businesses are the heart of any area not too mention the jobs they provide. That’s got to be better than more offices!

Save Union St website here! Petition here! News report here!

Two Recent Photos, Two Comments

The new shipping containers are arriving on the site of the old Shell Garage in front of Heygate Estate in readyness for the opening of artistic and creative ‘vibrant retail outlets and workshops‘. Seems like the first part of the plan is to recreate in model form Swanbourne House behind! Bloody creatives!
The first cut is the deepest. Mature Plane Tree in St Mary Newington Open Space destroyed for the new One The Elephant development behind.

Was like this!

RETURN OF WALKING THE RIP-OFF: GENTRIFICATION WALK OF THE ELEPHANT

SATURDAY 23rd FEBRUARY
Gather 2pm on the steps of The Tabernacle Church,
opposite the Shopping Centre, The Elephant SE1
End Point: Eileen House Occupation, 80 Newington Causeway, SE1

Once again we Southwark Notes folks invite any and all who wish to accompany us on a slow walk around the sites of regeneration and gentrification in The Elephant and Castle. We will be walking and talking about all your favourites: One The Elephant, 360 London site, Strata Tower, top of Walworth Rd, Heygate Estate, Tribeca Sq and beyond to the planned and already under construction site in Newington Causeway.

Although we always start the walk and the talk, the best bits of the event is always when those who have come begin to take over the chatting, sharing of anecdotes and chipping in all the differing senses of both frustration and sometimes anger over what is going on in The Elephant and it’s infamous regeneration. Now that the Regeneration Agreement Formerly Known As Confidential is no longer a secret, this new info will enable the walk to put into perspective both reasons and motivations for the ongoing regeneration rip-off locally.

We will finish the walk at the newly occupied Self Organised London occupation of Eileen House on Newington Causeway  where we can socialise and have tea together and continue in comfort all the conversations started on the walk.

COUNCIL LEAKS SOUTHWARK / LEND LEASE CONFIDENTIAL REGENERATION AGREEMENT

Southwark Notes email Inbox is usually full of foreign ex-president’s of national banks trying to get us to take their millions for them or offers to enlarge the size of our website and so on. Occasionally we get some fan mail or requests for interviews. So this Saturday 2nd February we were pretty stunned when an email from Dill Valentine (?) entitled ‘Elephant and Castle regeneration‘ landed there with some intriguing looking attachments. Hmm, what’s this we thought? A funny joke or some crazy spam?

Dear Southwark Notes,
We have chanced upon an easy way to read the redacted Regeneration Agreement between Lend Lease and Southwark Council. We think it throws up all sorts of questions. Please find a press release in continuation.
Yours truly,
Concerned Southwark Residents

WE HAVE BEEN CALLING THIS A RIP-OFF FOR A LONG TIME
Of course, regular readers or other concerned residents will know that this refers to the Regeneration Agreement signed between Lend Lease and Southwark Council in July 2010 shortly after Labour took over control of the Council. Locally people campaigning on a whole range of issues that are controversial in the by-now infamous Elephant regeneration (lack of truly affordable housing, social cleansing, smaller leisure centre, removal of mature trees, lack of insight into pressure put on local services and amenities with 1000′s of new residents coming to the area, housing density, effect on local businesses and so on) have long been asking both in and out of the official Elephant Regeneration consultation programmes for access to this agreement to enable them to make up their own minds about whether the existing residents are getting a good deal or not. This request has always been refused or stalled with the be-all-and-end-all mantra ‘commercial sensitivity‘. Well, consulting people on a regeneration programme where no-one local is allowed to see the fine details is a bit of perfunctory and cynical exercise in Public Relations (as we have said many times).

Recently however as part of the Council’s Compulsory Purchase Attempt for the last remaining leaseholders on the Heygate Estate they stuck up a heavily blacked out version of the July 2010 Regeneration Agreement on the Council website: (see below!)


UPDATE: 9AM MONDAY FEBRUARY 4th 2012
Above link to blacked out Regeneration Agreement, now removed from Council website!

What follows is the rest of the email:

—
PRESS RELEASE 31.1.2013

>>>>>> Embargoed until Monday 9.00am 4th February 2013 <<<<

Badly redacted document exposes confidential figures behind Southwark’s £1.5bn secretive regeneration scheme.

Southwark Council has accidentally exposed the contents of its deal with global property giant Lend Lease for the £1.5bn regeneration of the Elephant & Castle. A redacted PDF version of its confidential regeneration agreement was uploaded to the Council’s website as part of its compulsory purchase proceedings against remaining residents on the Heygate Estate which is a key site for the regeneration scheme:

 
http://www.southwark.gov.uk/download/8148/core_document_28-ra

 However the document has left it possible to copy and paste the heavily blacked-out text straight into any word processing software to reveal the entire contents. This comes as a welcome surprise for local campaigners who have been heavily critical of the lack of transparency around any real details of the Council and Lend Lease’s regeneration deal.

 The unintentional breach of the Regeneration Agreement’s strict confidentiality clauses comes after lengthy proceedings to censure an opposition councillor[1], who claimed the agreement was poor value for money after it was signed in July 2010[2]. Southwark’s cabinet member for regeneration, Cllr Fiona Colley response to these claims was that land value payments had been reduced in favour of a guarantee of 25% affordable housing, itself a breach of Southwark’s policy of a minimum 35% for developments in the Elephant & Castle Opportunity Area.[3] However the recently approved Heygate plans propose just 79 social rented units out of a total 2,535 new homes.

 The document reveals that having spent £44m[4] on emptying the Heygate Estate, Southwark Council is set to receive just £50m[5] in return for the 22 acre site. The agreement does give the Council a share of overage (profit left after the developer has taken a 20% priority slice), but a report from the District Valuer[6] shows a viability gap such that there is actually unlikely to be any overage.

Comparisons with other development sites at the Elephant show that the Council is receiving well below market value for its land: the neighbouring Tribeca Square 1.5 acre development site exchanged hands on the open market in 2011 for £40m. This is £10m below the council’s deal for the 22 acre Heygate site (see attached Land Registry info). The phased nature of the scheme, together with the cheap price of the land makes it more likely that the developer will engage in ‘land banking’[7] as they had previously done on the Greenwich peninsula Millennium site[8].

 Local campaigning groups have long been critical of what they see as the ‘social cleansing’ of the area and the failure of the regeneration to bring local benefits to the existing community. They say that the Council’s administration has sold the Elephant short in order to gain political advantage by honouring its manifesto pledge to deliver the regeneration after years of stalled negotiations.

[1]   
http://www.london-se1.co.uk/news/view/5869
[2]   
http://www.london-se1.co.uk/news/view/4712
[3]    
http://www.london-se1.co.uk/news/view/4879
[4]    Paragraphs 5.34 – 5.35:
http://www.southwark.gov.uk/download/8171/proofs_of_evidence__jon_abbot__final_proof
[5]    See pages 6 & 10 of the Regeneration Agreement – (Heygate Headlease Premium £46m + Rodney Rd. Headlease Premium £4m)
[6]    See Officer Report 12/AP/1092 paragraphs 150-153:
http://planningonline.southwark.gov.uk/DocsOnline/Documents/271840_1.pdf
[7]     Land banking is the practice of buying land with the intention of selling it when it becomes more profitable. Typically, land is divided into smaller plots and sold on to developers once it rises in value.
[8]    
http://www.nao.org.uk/publications/0708/greenwich_peninsula.aspx

There is a certain irony in the secretive agreement coming to light only because someone did some lateral thinking and cut and pasted the blacked out text into a word processing document. Seeing how the agreement’s confidentiality is referred to in the document itself -

’33.2.3 keep the Confidential Information and any copies of it secure and in such a way as to prevent unauthorised access by any third party;

33.2.5 inform the other party immediately if it becomes aware that Confidential Information has been disclosed to or come to the knowledge of an unauthorised third party’

there is the prospect of some real ticking off of the poor way in which the blacked out document was blacked out!

— A link to the un-blacked out pdf of the REGENERATION AGREEMENT JULY 2010 so you can read it properly—HERE

This is only really a side story though. More importantly, this is one document that begins to paint a clearer picture of what the regeneration deal at The Elephant really is. We would not comment on our analysis of the document and it’s financial information yet as the mind boggles when you try and read over 100 pages of legal speak so it may take us some time to fully comprehend it. Our question for now is how will both The Council and Lend Lease respond to this total muck up? And what does it mean for campaigners in the long fight so far for benefits for local people in any regeneration scheme?

With the first detailed planning application up before the Planning Committee this Tuesday 5th February seeking to build 235 mostly private or unaffordable homes on the old Heygate Site at Rodney Rd, we wonder what the Committee would make of the detailed financial agreements made in the Regeneration Agreement? Is this scheme really in the interests of Southwark residents? We hope they will be asking these questions and not sitting mutely as a few of them were on the 15th January Planning Meeting. These are representatives of local people tasked to serve those people’s interests by those people!

We immediately emailed Dill Valentine back but so far no response. We will keep you posted.

THE ELEPHANT NEVER FORGETS
The message from the recently Council approved Lend Lease’s Outline Masterplan for the area is that The Council are selling the Elephant area short by millions to allow a minimal amount of really affordable housing. Just to add more insanity to this and the Council’s own leak of the Agreement we would like to remind our readers of Leader of The Council’s Peter John thoughts on the Elephant regeneration plans three days before he took power in May 2010:

“”We want a deal signed and we want it signed sooner rather than later.

That is not at the expense of all the community facilities we were promised right at the outset. The heads of terms which were signed in November with Lend Lease didn’t include a leisure centre, they didn’t include a library, they didn’t include any of the community facilities we would have expected to have seen.

It was an agreement to build houses – and private houses at that. That’s simply not good enough.

If we’re going to redevelop the Elephant it has to include social housing as well as private housing, it has to include those vital community facilities and it has to have a shopping centre which people will want to go to.

At the moment there is no plan to deal with the shopping centre and what phase that will be within the whole regeneration structure.”

Oh Peter, what is finally in the deal you signed with Lend Lease two years ago? A reduced Leisure Centre that is only part of the deal because Lend Lease were given the sweetener of some prime SE1 land by The Tabernace to build a 40+ storey tower of luxury flats and no affordable housing (“That’s simply not good enough.“); no new library; no real ‘vital‘ community facilities to be worthy of the name; a refurbished shopping centre that seeks to include more private housing on top of it…and a total climbdown on The Council’s own policy of minimum 35% affordable housing in big new developments!

HEYGATE PHASE ONE: FREE INVITATION TO A FARCE – First Come, First Served

On Tuesday 5th February 2013 there will be the first planning meeting after Lend Lease’s Outline Master Planning Application that was approved on 15th January at Council HQ, Tooley St. That permission was only an outline of what they intend to do to ‘regenerate‘ the larger Heygate Site between New Kent Rd and Walworth Rd. But split from the whole thing has been the smaller Heygate site (Phase One) between Rodney Rd and Balfour St. Whereas there used to be 105 Council homes in that site, today there is nothing but rubble and weeds. The meeting next Tuesday will consider a detailed planning application for real, actual, solid buildings to be constructed on that site. It is this intended development that will set the tone for the bigger Heygate site.

COME ON DOWN! VIEW THE FARCE!
Below we list just a few of the planning permissions bad intention for the site and why it’s a crap deal for the long-standing existing population. But here and now we want to urge anyone who cares about The Elephant to attend this charade of open, democratic and inclusive planning of our community’s future. There will be once again be a fantastic bunch of local folks doing their best to object to the development in the 3 minutes of allotted time. Last time the meeting was held in the largest room in Tooley St but this was still too small to fit all those opposed to this regeneration scheme especially once the room had been filled with council folks, Lend Lease and Soundings Consultation company. It’s up to us to make our presence known to the Planning Committee and the strength of feeling in the room. It was pointed out to us that the meeting is not a ‘public meeting‘ but a ‘meeting held in public‘ as if this wordplay can cancel out what the public might have to say on the matter!

Why local people are angry could be any of the following:
• There is a small percentage of almost affordable homes included in the new scheme. This is because the developer has cried once more that the economic crisis makes it hard to maximise such profits if they have to build a minimum of 35% affordable houses which they are required to do by Southwark’s own policies.
The issue of affordability is fudged anyhow as the new affordable homes will not be genuinely affordable to long term local residents. Only 8 units of the affordable housing shortfall will be socially rented (so a reasonable rent level). The other affordable housing provision will consist of only 18 units with rents set at 50% of a private market rent.

• Section 106 agreements, that is money a developer gives to The Council as a kind of community benefit will mainly be spent within the development site itself and not on and around nearby streets as would make sense. So really there is a real lack of public benefits if the only regeneration of the public realm is actually a part of the private development.

• The Elephant & Castle regeneration zone is supposed to be car-free (as stipulated in the Council’s own plans and policies) as the area is served by many buses, two tube lines and a train station: ‘The inclusion of these 23 non-designated bays as part of the development does not comply with policies that require developments in areas of high public transport accessibility to be car-free’. The Council is happy to ignore it’s own rules because they see the site as a ‘catalyst’ (like an accelerator?) for the wider regeneration zone. But does this ‘unfortunate’ rule breaking become the exception that proves the rule. Er..yes! Break the rules now and then it’s becomes easier for the next regeneration site. They even have the cheek to say that it’s so important to get all that affordable housing built (26 units) that relaxing the rules now is worth it. So you can blame those in need of affordable housing for all that car-parking!!

• The scheme is way to dense. 235 homes will replace 105. Half the trees on the site have already been chopped down anyhow so no need to worry about them and the bats that were roosting on site were denied by The Council to avoid a clear breach of strict bat protection laws. The Over-5′s children play area will be delivered off-site which means nowhere near the development and across many big roads wherever it maybe. The Basketball courts already on the site despite promises have been locked up for more than two years. There will only be a 25% amount of affordable retail units available. There has been no real development of the legacy of this development nor the impact of 600+ people moving into the area on the local services. Many of the homes will feature raised courtyards for the enjoyment of the homeowners. Such private and gated space is being fudged statistically with the reported amount of amenity space provided.

Phase One is a rip-off in progress as we like to say. It is The Elephant being sold under our noses. Tuesday’s Detailed Planning Application meeting is where the rip-off sell out will take place. Your free invitation to this farce has been issued by Southwark Council. Make sure you don’t miss the pantomime!

LABOURING PETER JOHN

Regular readers of Southwark Notes will know that when we want to labour a point, we will do! In our previous post we pointed out that when Leader of The Council Peter John blames the silent poster protest at the Heygate Masterplan Planning Permission Meeting on those ‘not from The Elephant & Castle’, we wondered both how he might have known this and would it even matter if they were. We also said that pretending it was outsiders who came along to disrupt the event was ‘one of the oldest and slimiest political tricks in the book‘

When we asked him via Twitter how he knew it was people from outside The Elephant his reply made us sense that maybe he then wondered if it had been such a good idea to hastily and publicly blame it on outsiders. So switching to the perhaps the second ‘oldest and slimiest political tricks in the book‘, the tactic of divide and rule, he replied that that was what he was told by ‘residents who were from E&C at the meeting & have been involved in consultation. Take it up with them‘. We would point out this:

1) Peter believes so much in the consultation process as the most amazing winner of hearts and minds locally but forgets that despite members of Elephant Amenity Network, Wansey St and Garland Court TRA and Heygate Leaseholders Group all being some part of the consultation, they were the ones at the meeting objecting to the Masterplan and being quizzed on those objections by councillors for nearly two hours. Elephant Amenity Network had even sent a public letter to both Soundings Consultation agency and to Sarah Gaventa as Chair of the Lend Lease-created Regeneration Forum criticising the consultation process. The letter was signed by 28 local people or those working locally. So it’s not as if those who chose to take part in the consultations wouldn’t have something to protest about nor support the protest which is what many of those there on the night did. The objections and the signs in the protest were saying the same things.

In addition when we recently published our lengthy analysis of Soundings and the consultation: Listening To No End, we had had lots of emails of support and thanks from local people who were part of the consultation and agreed with our dire judgement of it all. We suspect it would be a hard task indeed to find many people who thought that the hours and hours we all spent in consultation had actually achieved anything substantial in the Outline Masterplan. Simply put it hasn’t and that is why objections to the plan took two hours!

2) Telling us to ‘Take it up with them‘ is a classic switching of gears and maneuvering himself away from any responsibility for what he had said. Now it can be spun as a case of it was the good objectors who had been consulted who told him it was bad outsiders so it wasn’t his fault if they had been wrong! Well, the most obvious point to make again is – in a public meeting open to all, how would anyone know where everyone had come from? But this is somewhat by the by really! We were in the room and we certainly recognised quite a few of them and the local Elephant campaigns they are part of because there has been such a slow but building resentment of this regeneration scheme as more and more promises are broken that you do get to know a few people along the way!

We leave this labouring the point with an amazing email we received after the Planning Meeting and our report on it. It puts the case much more eloquently and brilliantly than we might be able to:

“Dear Southwark Notes,
I think that the objectors and protesters at the Planning Committee last Tuesday were an amazing evidence of what could only be called a process of collective self-education about planning and urban regeneration policies in the Elephant. The depth and ingenuity of the objectors’ arguments was only schematically reflected in the protestors’ references to planning regulations and policies. But it was all there because years ago many local residents embarked on a process of learning and disseminating information about the changes proposed and taking place, putting up or attending visioning events, holding regular open monthly meetings to discuss changes in the proposed plans, seeking the advice and knowledge of urban experts, writing concerned and informed letters and emails to local Councillors, to MPs, to planning experts, architects, newspapers; making and watching documentaries about the area; organising and visiting photographic exhibitions of local communities, interviewing and being interviewed…

The objections and the protesters are only a small testimony of this large, engaged and enraged community of concerned citizens and residents that know the area as the back of their hands, having spent years poring over badly written and incongruous plans and contradictory policies, and evenings and days formulating the right questions to ask at ‘consultation’ meetings and open events… this is a participatory, varied and democratic public – one that understands constrains and not only critiques but also proposes (see EAN Visioning Event repart and EAN Interim uses report), that has always tried to engage and never to simply reject urban change…

The accusation that they are not ‘local residents’ is baffling: only an act of love for the neighbourhood and the area would have made all those people remain in a stiflingly hot and stuffy room for over 6 hours listening to planning jargon, poring over 200 pages documents, attentive, furiously taking notes, knowing what was being said, why the developers’ speech was full of euphemisms and fuzzy sales pitches, because none of what they say is grounded in the reality of the area, because what they are proposing is just another anonymous and alienating cut and paste from their repertoire of ‘global solutions’”

—
Normal Southwark Notes service will now be resumed after this unnecessary hiatus concerning The Leader of The Council.