If you weren’t at last week’s meeting you will have missed a couple of revelations. Firstly, as pictured below, our scale model of Southern Grove’s Manor Road Tower, next to a row of typical terraced houses and the existing Waitrose Tower, shocked many with its size.
Secondly, there was news about the £100m granted to Ealing for new building housing by the GLA in October last year. Hopefully the details below will give you some further reasons to object to the towers:
Did you know that Ealing Council took a £100m grant1 from the Greater London Assembly (GLA) in October last year, specifically to help build new properties?
This means the two tower proposals are a precipice to Ealing Council’s policy of building high rise towers across the Borough. It has become evident through our campaign that there is very, very little public awareness over the amount of sky-high building going on and being planned in our Borough.
The taller they can build, the more chance of hitting Ealing Council’s target of 2500 new homes2 that are part of the London Plan. However, whilst the London Plan talks about population growth, London’s population has actually fallen in the last 2 years and the impact of the ‘Brexit’ process means we are unlikely to see the levels of growth the London Plan predicted when it was originally drafted.
The £100m that Ealing took was a tenth of the overall GLA budget of £1billion for 26 London Boroughs, so this puts Ealing at the forefront of mass development in London at a disproportionate level to the size of our suburban Borough, with plans for up to 26 towers anticipated this year3.
Our GLA local representative Onkar Sahota has made sympathetic noises in his response to your and our correspondence, but he has not been unequivocal in his support for our cause and he has not been explicit in guidance in how to prevent these developments. He has made no mention of the grant of £100m in his responses and the implications for Ealing.
Ealing Council are one year into their four-year term, and we need to stand up now and make sure they don’t ride roughshod over the wishes of local residents. We are not against reasonable development. In low rise residential areas like ours we support genuinely affordable and sustainable community housing. However, we view what is being planned in West Ealing as totally unreasonable.
We need to be clear to all the elected leaders that they need to look after the interests of us as their constituents. We cannot stand idly by and see our beautiful Borough built into a high-rise concrete jungle so politicians can add units to headlines that in reality do very little to reduce the Council’s waiting list.
To make the case in point, a minimum income of £44,000 is needed for anyone buying a shared ownership dwelling in Southern Grove’s Manor Road Tower, and only 38 of the 183 at A2Dominion’s Hastings Road tower are for ‘affordable rent’. Although family homes are most in demand from those on the social housing register, only around 10 out of the 332 units in these two developments will be affordable, 3 bedroom properties.
In light of the above, our view at Stop The Towers is that what happens with these two developments and their 100m high towers in a low rise residential area will set a precedent for the rest of Ealing and could allow the Council to dramatically alter the Ealing we all know and love for the worse over the rest of their four-year term in office.
Please help us to send a clear message now to our elected leaders over what we see as reasonable, progressive development.
Before formal planning applications are submitted, we particularly recommend you keeping contacting with:
Onkar Sahota – our GLA member
onkar.sahota@london.gov.uk
Julian Bell – Labour’s Council Leader
julian.bell@ealing.gov.uk
Peter Mason – Labour Cabinet Lead on Planning
peter.mason@ealing.gov.uk
Rupa Huq – Local Labour MP
rupa.huq.mp@parliament.uk
Virendra Sharma – Local Labour MP
sharmav@parliament.uk
Steve Pound – Local Labour MP
stevepoundmp@parliament.uk
You can also see more here: https://stopthetowers.info/how-to-object for easy ways to object by click of a mouse to the above and more.
Please include your postal address (some of our elected representatives have requested this), and bcc us in stopthetowers@hotmail.com if you can.
And please share this with your friends and family.
1. The Council took a £100m grant from the GLA in October last year to help build affordable houses. http://www.ealinginlondon.com/news-1/ealing-council-awarded-100m-for-new-homes
2. The Council have tied themselves to building 2500 new homes by 2022. http://ealingnewsextra.co.uk/latest-news/new-homes
3. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/mar/05/tall-buildings-london-skyline-2019
Thank you again for your continued support
The Stop The Towers Team
PS We would really like to make a big push on getting the posters up, please can you print off from here and influence friends and family to put one up.
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