Just a quick note to say that I understand that the revised design for the stained glass window at Northbrook School was APPROVED by Planning Committee A at their meeting on Thursday night. Papers available here.

A number of residents on Brightfield Road have complained to us about lorries arriving to visit the Northbrook School construction site before 8am in the morning, in breech of the agreed delivery times.  In fairness to the site managers, Costain, they have erected signs at the end of the road to tell drivers not to do this, but obviously they have been ignored.

I raised this issue with the project team at a meeting with them on Thursday night.  They have kindly agreed to take this up with their suppliers to avoid this happening again.

Should this be a problem in future, this can be reported to Costain’s Project Manager, Clive Kraus, on 8297 1032 or e-mail clive.kraus {at} costain(.)com

Please do also let your local councillors know. We have a monthly meeting with the project team and can raise issues like this on residents’ behalf.

Finally, Costain are holding a drop-in session for local residents from 2pm on Friday 26th February – simply turn up at the Brightfield Road site entrance if there’s an issue you’d like to raise. I understand the intention is to continue these drop-in sessions once a fortnight at the same time.

Planning committee B met last Thursday night to consider the application to vary the planning permission awarded in September 2008 for the new Northbrook School building on Taunton Road.  As you’ll remember, the applicants wanted to add louvres around the windows and also change the agreed colour of the render.  This also brought to light the fact that a design had been agreed for the feature stained glass window behind closed doors.

The committee APPROVED the revised render and louvres – the render having being toned down from the initial variation proposals.

Given the huge controversy the Northbrook application has caused locally, I was amazed to read that the Conservative Party propose to take school planning applications even further from public scrutiny and have them decided by the Bristol-based planning inspectorate.  We need more public scrutiny and democratic accountability for this huge school-building programme, not less!

Further to my post earlier this month, latest info on the Northbrook application is:

• The application to vary the render shades and add louvres is going to planning committee B on Thursday 4th February.  Officers have recommended to the committee that the application is approved.  You can read the report here. The meeting is held in public at 7.30pm at the Civic Suite, Catford, so you’re welcome to attend if you wish.
• The application to alter the window to reflect the more appropriate design agreed with the community (see my 12th Jan post) has now been received.  The application and drawings can be viewed online, at the Planning Office at Laurence House, Catford, or at Manor House Library during normal library opening hours.   Deadline for comments is 9th February.  These can be emailed to planning {at} lewisham.gov(.)uk – please quote ref DC/10/73303, and feel free to copy me  in.

Tuesday’s Local Assembly went really well – with a big turnout (about 100, I’d say) which was really good for a cold, dark January evening!

Manor Park

I explained that the £22,500 we allocated to the park at our September meeting has now been supplemented with a further £32,500 from the Parks Department, meaning £55,000 will be invested to bring the disused building in the park back into use.  Work will take place from April, and should be completed by September.  This will deliver:

• A base for 2-3 members of staff from the parks contractor
• A meeting venue for use by the community (e.g. the Manor Park User Group or youth club) and local schools
• Fully accessible toilet facilities
• The potential to re-open the Kiosk facility that once existed.

The ‘Trinity Enrichment Project’ – previously known as the Northbrook Primary Transition Project – is already using the park as a ‘Forest School’ for kids who are looking to move to secondary school from one of our local primaries, and clearly the building will make this kind of use so much easier.  The addition of toilets will also make the kid’s play park so much easier to use for parents.   This is all really good news, and I can’t wait to see the finished product in September.

I also updated the Assembly on the bridge project.  This is a proposal to create a bridge across the Quaggy, enabling a third entrance to the park from Longhurst Road.  The Assembly backed this proposal in principle at the September meeting.  The latest info we have is that the Council are seeking to meet with EDF (London Electric) to clarify their requirements for access to a small substation on the Longhurst side of the river.  As I understand it, the substation doesn’t need to be moved – the Council just needs to work out what access EDF require to it so they can plan accordingly.  A planned meeting in January didn’t happen due to the snow, but they’re hopeful they’ll meet up soon.  Once this is done, a planning application will be submitted and residents will be consulted in the usual way.

Leegate

The Assembly approved the draft constitution for the Friends of Leegate Group (now to be branded ‘Lee Green Lives’).  An AGM will be called in due course to elect officers and formally constitute the group.  Everyone who’s signed up to be involved will be invited – if you haven’t already signed up, or aren’t sure whether you’re on the supporters’ list, give me a shout and I’ll make sure you find out about the AGM.

Secondly, we launched our Leegate Survey.  This is intended to guide the work of the group (and the new Town Centre Manager) by establishing what the local community’s priorities are – for both short term and longer term improvements to the centre.  You can complete the survey at www.tinyurl.com/leegate

The Lee Green Lives group are also hoping to share in the use of the shop unit in the centre which St Modwen have provided (see youth provision below)

Finally, residents asked why the Council had bought the Catford Centre from St Modwen’s but had not done the same with Leegate.  The answer offered by the Deputy Mayor was that Catford is fully-occupied and can therefore be relied on to pay its way, while Leegate, because it is half-empty, wouldn’t cover the costs of the loan required to pay for it.  This shows quite a short-sighted attitude on behalf of the Council, in my opinion.  Given no detailed modelling has been done on this, I think this is something we should still pursue with the Council.  Who knows what might happen if longer term leases were on offer at the centre?

Energy Action Zones

During the break, residents got the chance to meet Carmel from the Council’s Energy Action Zone team.  Lee Green is an Energy Action Zone until April, which basically means a team will be out and about knocking on doors, giving advice on energy efficiency and advising whether you might be eligible for a grant or discounted fuel bill.  You’ll also get two free energy saving light bulbs!   You can read more about the Energy Action Zones here. If you can’t wait for the team to get to you, then you can book an appointment to see them by calling Sue Cole on 8314 8392.

Youth provision

Muhammad Rahmani from the Youth Service explained the problems we’ve had securing a location for the Lee Green Youth Club.  The latest possibility is to use a unit in the Leegate Centre, which St Modwens have agreed to provide rent-free for a year.  This will require some work and is currently being looked at by the Council.

In the meantime, from February 5th, there’ll be sports activities for 13-19 year olds at Colfe’s School Leisure Centre (access via Upwood Road) every Friday from 6.30pm until 9.30pm.

After Muhammad had given his update, two young people who’ve attended the youth leadership training we paid for through the locality fund gave us a presentation on their views of Lee Green, and then got the audience to vote using large pieces of coloured paper on what they thought of some parts of Lee Green.  I found the results very thought-provoking.

Parking

Finally, we got on to discuss parking – always a hot potato.  Bill Tarplett from the Council’s highways team gave a presentation on what’s going to happen between now and April on parking.  You can read more about this in detail here. Bill did a good job answering the technical aspects of the consultation, and of the operation of the zones currently.  However, many of the changes residents would like to see (like two hour restrictions, rather than all-day-long ones) aren’t in his gift – they’re issues of policy rather than operation.  The people who set the policy are the Mayor and his cabinet.  They say they can’t afford to reduce the CPZ hours at present.  Given they make £1.3million from the operation of controlled parking zones each year, you can understand their reluctance to give up this cash cow.  However, the fact they’re raking in such a profit surely negates their pleas that they can’t even afford to consult people on it.  The assembly has injected some common sense into the discussion by securing the ward-wide review – now we need to keep campaigning for a two-hour option.

Overall, a really good night.  Tuesday was the last Assembly before the local elections, so I’d like to thank everyone who’s attended one of the seven Assembly meetings we’ve had so far.  Chairing them has been challenging at times, but mostly good fun, and I hope people have found them as useful as I have.

Before Christmas, I wrote here and here about the controversy over the changes to the Northbrook School front window, which had been approved behind closed doors by Lewisham Council without any consultation with residents or their local councillors.

I’m pleased to say that following a meeting with residents and the Lee Manor Society held just before the Christmas break, the designers have come back with a revised window which addresses many of the concerns local people had – the image to the right illustrates how this will look (we’re waiting for a better visual from the designers).

The change to the window will have to go through the planning process in due course, and I was told at the meeting that residents will be consulted on the window this time. 

In the meantime, the planning department are consulting on some alterations to the render colour/louvres application.  This has now been changed again to tone down the yellows, oranges and reds.  You can see examples here.  Residents have until Friday to get their comments to planning {at} lewisham.gov(.)uk (quote DC/09/72596, and please feel free to copy me in).

For reference, the main page for the render/louvres application is here.   Incidently, the notes of the public meeting I chaired on 24th November are now online here.

The frustrating thing is that we could have got here a lot more quickly if the Council had chosen to consult locally in the first place…