Planning III: Sky Gardens revised affordable housing goes to committee

The Sky Gardens brouhaha may be coming to a conclusion.

Regular readers may recall that developers caused consternation and no little outrage with an audacious request to reduce the level of affordable housing they must provide from 31% to zero.

Following some financial analysis and various negotiations, it seems that planning officers are recommending that the Council accept a revised figure of 17% at the Planning Applications Committee meeting to take place on Tuesday 3rd September 2013.

The revised agreement sees the retention of all 35 of the social-rented dwellings originally agreed but reduces the number of shared ownership apartments in the tower from 24 to six.

The longer version of the story, from what I can glean from the documentation, is this.

The original planning agreement included the following condition:

The provision of 31% of the proposed residential accommodation by habitable rooms [24.68% by number of units, as far as I an see] amounting to 59 dwellings as affordable housing, of which 70% amounting to 35 dwellings shall be social rented and 30% amounting to 24 dwellings shall be intermediate with grant basis. In the event that grant is not obtained for this development, then the overall number and proportions of affordable housing shall be recalculated and agreed based upon the revised viability model according to the GLA toolkit; Equally, a ‘review mechanism’ be included in the Section 106 agreement that would result in an increase in affordable housing provision and/or a payment in lieu if sales values or commercial rents improve prior to the completion of the scheme.

The 35 social rented units were to be provided within a single building, ‘the Wyvil Road building’ and 24 shared ownership units in the lower levels of the ‘Tower’ building. This provision was based on the
assumption that grant funding totalling circa £4.550 million for the social rent and £1.080 million for the shared ownership units would be available with remaining subsidy provided by the applicant.

Since the General Election in 2010, restrictions in public expenditure have led to a greatly reduced grant budget for 2011-2015. Grant funding towards affordable housing required under Section 106 agreements is excluded from grant support unless in exceptional circumstances. The Assumed Grant is now not available as a consequence and as per the decision of members in 2010, the applicant sought agreement to amend the total affordable housing provision.

The applicant submitted an affordable housing viability submission wherein the provision of affordable housing was to be reduced to nil. Following review of the viability submission and negotiations between officers and the applicant, the applicant has agreed to accept the revisions of the Council to the assumptions on which the viability submission was made. Based on these revisions, it has been determined that the scheme could viably deliver some of the original affordable housing provision however that a reduction is
necessary based on the lack of any grant funding available.

Read the documentation here.

Footnote

Confusion has seemingly been caused by a letter sent out to people who objected to the application to eliminate the affordable housing element of the scheme. This letter says "This letter notifies you that a proposed development you have commented on is due to be considered by the council’s Planning Applications Committee" and merely says "The recommendation for this application is to Grant Permission". I have tried to get clarification from the Lambeth case officer Tom Watt 020 7926 1232 but his voicemail is full and apparently everyone else is busy but he should call me back within two to three working days and I'm very welcome to call back and try again. This, after being routed through a fabulously poor voice recognition system which is unable to grasp the name Tom Watt at all.