| Topic: | Re:Re:Re:Re:Re:Re:Waitrose site should kick start the building of housing in West Ealing | |
| Posted by: | Simon Hayes | |
| Date/Time: | 30/05/25 08:24:00 |
| The Lammas Park scheme is indicative of the arrogant attitude of the councillors and officers running LBE. They did no safety assessments or even a flood risk assessment before agreeing to the scheme. As it stands there is no published justification for the work, just the blithe climate crisis bull. The Local Government Ombudsman report has yet to be released and it will be interesting to see whether it finds that the scheme is justified. The council has belatedly accepted some of the recommendations in the RoSPA report it commissioned earlier this year. They are likely to be inadequate to ensure the safety of park users, particularly small children, who previously enjoyed unfettered access to the part of the park. One only has to see how many footballs lie in the depths of the craters to see where an immediate safety concern is. I suspect the whole pond area will eventually be fenced off, which was never in the original plan (such as that was). It’s simple greenwashing to facilitate the building of ever more huge tower blocks in central Ealing. As for undeveloped sites with granted planning permission there’s the Orion Park space opposite Northfields station that remains empty years after demolition of the old buildings. The problem is that the likes of Mason, Driscoll et al are nowhere near as clever as they like to believe. Developers expect to make a minimum 25 percent profit on any scheme and with the current market state in construction that’s difficult. Hence the land banking. It also means less or no social housing and surreptitious increases in scale under the laughably termed ‘minor material amendments’ clause. Usually without any public scrutiny. There’s an element of social cleansing behind all this. Get the young, fit and well-heeled in who don’t need schools, medical care and all the other infrastructure that a proper town needs to thrive. That’s why these CGI graphics always show happy cyclists sipping coffee in the dappled shade outside some mythical cafe. It’s not real life and it’s not sustainable. At some point people will realise what’s happening to the areas in which they live but by then it might be too late. It already is for West Ealing. |