I’m beginning to feel a bit like Keith Flett.
In my last posting I promised to report the result of my enquiry of Councillor Chris Best who publicly claimed to have received letters from local residents about the Bell Green development. The implication of her remarks was that she had received quite a few letters in support of the developer’s application.
Councillor Best has ignored my enquiry.
I think we can safely assume that Councillor Best received very few letters, if any, in support of the proposals.
The most significant event since I last posted is the Secretary of State’s decision to ‘call-in’ the Bell Green development. This means that the decisions of Lewisham Council and the GLA to approve the developer’s plans have been over-ridden by the Secretary of State, who wants to decide matters for himself.
The Secretary of State rarely calls-in planning applications that have been approved at a local level and would do so only if the planning issues involved are of more than local importance and if he is not convinced by the local authority’s arguments in favour of the application.
The terms of the Secretary of State’s call-in relating to Bell Green are comprehensive covering a wide range of issues, especially traffic and retailing matters.
This brings me smack bang back to the feeble consideration given to the Bell Green applications by our local councillors. Not one of them had the interest or wit to express any significant doubts about the developer’s proposals. Indeed most of our local councillors showed very little interest in the scheme. Whilst it is far from certain that the Secretary of State will eventually refuse the developer’s application, the call-in does show that on the basis of a relatively quick look at the papers he had sufficient doubts about the whole scheme to want to take a closer look.
Contrast that with our local councillors who, having had the opportunity over many years to examine the issues involved, failed to detect that a very large retail park at Bell Green might just cause problems for Sydenham and other local centres.
Bryan Leslie