Fairview New Homes has recently acquired an interest in the Cricklewood B&Q site and would welcome an opportunity to discuss its plans with local residents in the coming weeks and months.
If you would like to get involved with this, please let the committee know.
See also the Councillors’ related update.
Councillors Anne Clarke and Alan Schneiderman write:
From the NorthWestTWO website …
The inquiry into Montreaux’s planning application for the B&Q site (1049 residential units, up to 18 storeys) is coming in February 2023. On 8th November, Barnet’s Strategic Planning Committee met to decide how to approach it. Council officers began as if for an appeal and proposed, basically, that as the committee had voted to approve the application last year, the council should support it at the inquiry. Seems obvious, but ….
For NorthWestTWO, Ben argued that it’s an inquiry not an appeal; the council had never issued a decision that it now had to defend; the committee had never approved the officers’ flawed report or voted on the merits of the application; a then-leading councillor had told them it was very bad but they had to vote to approve it, otherwise the Mayor of London would impose something worse. Oh, we also revealed that the draft Local Plan, which supported the development, is in trouble.
For the Railway Terraces, Jessica expanded on that and on just how bad the development would be for the Terraces and all Cricklewood. Councillors Schneiderman and Clarke spoke strongly against it too.
The committee voted 1:6 against the officers proposal, i.e. against supporting the application.
It didn’t end there. Pretty soon the officers had worked out an alternative proposal and that was carried 6:1, with cross-party support. Barnet’s position at the inquiry will be, in part:
The proposed development and the parameters sought, by virtue of the excessive height, scale and massing would result in a discordant and visually obtrusive form of development that would demonstrably fail to respect the local context and its established pattern of development, to the detriment of the character and appearance of the area and the setting of the adjacent Railway Terraces Conservation Area.
We’re very pleased. We still want to join in at the inquiry, there’s even more than that to be said, but it won’t be the residents against Barnet and the developers. The council is now with us.
Our neighbours in NorthWestTWO advise …
Barnet Council have been told not to approve Montreaux’s application yet, to give the Secretary of State time to decide whether or not to get involved.
The letter went to Barnet last Friday. The Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities “hereby directs your Council not to grant permission on this application without specific authorisation. This direction is issued to enable him to consider whether he should direct … that the application should be referred to him for determination.”
So as things stand, the Secretary of State (Michael Gove) hasn’t decided yet whether to call it in.
If he does call it in, then an inspector will carry out a public inquiry and make a report with recommendations. The Secretary of State would then grant planning permission or refuse the application. That’s how it usually goes, anyway. We’re not experts but we know it varies – sometimes the Secretary of State will invite further representations after the inspector’s reported, for example.
If he doesn’t call it in, Barnet will be free to go ahead and issue approval – the planning committee voted to approve it last September, and the Mayor of London has told Barnet he’s not getting involved.
More details here.
As we previously noted, Barnet provided further opportunity to comment on the revised plans for the B&Q site.
The NorthWestTwo Residents Association among many others have repeatedly voiced their opposition to the plan. You can read their latest objection here.
The online consultation has now ended and the planning outcome is pending. However, comments can still be emailed to planning.consultation@barnet.gov.uk and will be accepted up until the time that the decision is made.
Ben Tansley from NorthWestTwo writes …
You’ve probably already seen that Montreaux have made a last-minute amendment to their plans, cutting the height of the tallest block to 19 storeys, leaving tower blocks 15, 16, 17, 18, 19 and now again 19 storeys high – still more than twice the height of anything else in Cricklewood. This reduced the proposal by just 50 residential units, cutting it to 1050 units. They may have hoped this would make it more acceptable to the planning committee on 13 July 2021, but now there’s a new consultation and it can’t go to committee until September.
NorthWestTwo Residents Association, the Railway Terraces Residents Association and many, many others remain thoroughly opposed to this application. It’s still overwhelming, overbearing and out of keeping, too dense, and too much of a burden on local amenities, while its purported benefits crumble on examination.
Initial consultation was undertaken in October 2018, with letters being sent to 780 addresses. Following revisions to the scheme, an additional consultation was undertaken in June 2019. In total 480 objections were received, although only 81 of these objections were received in relation to the revised scheme.
You may be very tired of this and feel you’ve said so much already! Even so, it could be very worthwhile to go to Barnet’s planning portal again and simply say you still object. The new deadline is 16th July.
You may also have thought of more to say, in which case do add it and go into as much detail as you want! As the website itself says “If your comment is over 2000 characters please submit another online comment, begin the comment with ‘Continued’.” Lots of us have done that. But most of all, do make sure your previous objection isn’t dismissed or discounted – say it still stands!
Ben Tansley writes …
I have news about the B&Q site. Barnet Council have opened a new consultation on the planning application. They’ve done so without any publicity. They have not put notices on the street, or emailed or written to any of the thousand objectors to the plans. It’s running for just two weeks, 17 May to 31 May 2021. They say this is because they’ve received additional information, an “Urban Design Study” submitted by Montreaux that has new “photorealistic” images of the development and much praise for its elegance and generosity.
We’re concerned that the planning officers’ recommendation might claim that the thousand objections have largely been refuted by this Study. So NorthWestTwo is publicising the consultation on our website Cricklewood B&Q site – May 2021 consultation – NorthWestTWO and elsewhere.
You’ll find images and extracts from the study on that web page, plus links to that and to last month’s revised transport assessment, which is also seriously flawed.
