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British Library site shame
• DESPITE the campaign in your newspaper, the campaign run by local residents, the requirements of Camden’s Unitary Development Plan, and the support of the council executive to secure Brill Place for a mixed use development, Gordon Brown’s “listening” administration has again had its fingers in its ears over Camden’s housing.
It shows the arrogance of this Whitehall-centric, top-down Labour government that the wishes and needs of our community for more housing on the Brill Place site can be so blatantly ignored.
This Labour government’s record on housing for Camden is shocking. Our community has been let down again and again – the arms-length management organisation fiasco in 2003, the refusal to hand over the promised £283 million for Decent Homes repairs, and now the sale of Brill Place for a medical research facility with no commitment from the purchaser for any housing on the site.
There are 15,000 people on the Camden housing waiting list. It’s an indictment of how much notice the government is prepared to take of local circumstances that this fact doesn’t figure in its decision – quick buck rather than investment in local needs. Our community deserves much better treatment than this. Shame.
JO SHAW
Liberal Democrat Parliamentary Spokesperson
Holborn and St Pancras
Stick to the promises!
• ON Saturday, the people of Somers Town, young and old, were out on the streets again demonstrating against the proposed sale of the land behind the British Library.
We have shown that we are prepared to stand up and fight for our community and for the council housing and facilities for local people that are so desperately needed in Camden.
Now we want politicians and the powers that be to match this spirit and commitment, and to make sure they do not throw away this opportunity for a development that meets local people’s needs.
The promises sound good. Gordon Brown says he aims to build three million new homes.
The money allocated to the mayor for house-building in London has been increased to nearly £4 billion. Recent announcements state that government-owned land should be used for house building.
The British Library is government-owned land. No one has yet explained why in the face of all these announcements, it is being sold off rather than used for housing need in the way that the government is promising.
Keith Moffitt, leader of Camden Council, said on TV in response to our demonstration, that he agrees with us. He did write a letter to the housing minister after our deputation to the last council meeting. But the time has come for more than letter writing.
We need urgent intervention and some real action, to make sure that the government sticks to their promises – before it is too late and the land is sold off.
CANDY UDWIN
Somers Town People’s Forum
Cllr Roger Robinson
Labour, St Pancras and Somers Town Ward
It’s time to decide
• AT the Somers Town area forum there was an understandable and entirely correct focus on the fate of the British Library land.
But there was also a strong concern expressed about a lower- level but still important issue – the environmental condition of Somers Town. One participant had fallen over on the way to the meeting due to poor street lighting; others noted how routes to King’s Cross station had, as a result of the St Pancras development, changed with bewildering rapidity and were inadequately signposted. Disabled and frail users of community transport are stranded, with vehicles unable to reach them due to road works and builders’ sheds. There are continuing concerns about cyclists’ safety in the vicinity of heavy builders’ vehicles, and talk of a mouse “plague” on some estates.
It is entirely Camden Council’s responsibility to deal with the co-ordination of such environmental issues – something that it can act on unilaterally. The senior council official at my table indicated that without a co-ordinating mechanism, decisions, say, to close one road, were being made without knowledge that the alternative route had already been closed by a different utility or council body.
Given that having suffered through the construction of the British Library and St Pancras Station, the area will next be affected by the King’s Cross development, and the British Library development, whatever it is, surely it is time to deal with this issue, to minimise the disruption and distress not by the spending of vast amounts of money, but by the application of thought and planning.
NATALIE BENNET
South Camden Green Party
Zero option at Brill Place
• THE planning brief for the Brill Place site behind the British Library is surely right to highlight the need for a mixed development, that is a combination of housing, public services and jobs for local people.
An animal testing laboratory or 100 per cent social housing, to name two of the options that have been proposed, would not, in my book, fit the bill.
But there is a bigger possibility, one that answers both the planning brief (written under the previous Labour administration) and concern about climate change.
We should use the site to build Camden’s first zero carbon development, to deliver the maximum in energy efficiency, to produce its own renewable energy, to promote walking and cycling, to maximise green spaces and embrace our need for water – a project which, put simply, celebrates healthy living rather than fossil fuels, concrete and pollution.
I would have liked to see the King’s Cross development secure the prize of Camden’s first zero carbon development, but by the time our Development Control committee understood the dangers of climate change it was too late to change the developer’s plans.
Now we have another chance.
If Gordon Brown means his rhetoric about building environmentally friendly homes, if Camden Council is to keep its promise to put sustainability at the heart of everything it does, if our community is to embrace with pride the fight against climate change, then Brill Place is the place for Camden’s first zero carbon development.
I hope our national and local politicians will rise to the challenge.
CLLR ALEXIS ROWELL
Camden Eco Champion
Sell-off is ‘scandalous’
• WHY is Gordon Brown’s government so hell-bent on handing over council housing to the private sector, threatening secure tenancies and leading to a return to the Rachman- like landlords we spent so long getting rid of?
Last week I received an estate agent’s leaflet through my door saying that a one-bedroom council flat in Somers Town had been sold for £265,000. A young couple with a baby live in a one-bedroom private flat in a council block round the corner.
The landlord charges an extortionate rent of £250 a week, for which they receive housing benefit and government tax credits in order to be able to pay, despite the husband working. Council tenants in the same block pay £65 a week. You don’t need to be an economist to work out who benefits from this situation.
It is scandalous that Camden Council is planning to sell off even more. The Housing Federation has just announced that you now have to earn at least £100,000 a year to buy a home in London.
SUE WOMACK
Bridgeway Street, NW1
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