EDC

We have to have the ideological will, and that’s going to be a hell of a battle. I’ll give you an example. We’ve had a couple of battles over developments lately, and one of them is at Newcombe House in Notting Hill Gate, which is very very anti-resident to put it lightly. The other one is Kensington Forum Hotel in Gloucester Road, which is again very resident unfriendly, and again, it’s because they’re both sixties buildings, and the way they’ve been planned is that they’re set back, they don’t take up all the light and so on – the sort of thing people don’t recognise until they lose it, that modernist period buildings are very courteous to the neighbourhood even if they don’t like the height, there were a lot of things that they recognised then which have no been forgotten. Now they’re trying to just fill the space with building, very high.

So I’ve had, unfortunately, to have debates with the Mayor’s office about these two projects, and they’ll say ‘well, we’re getting a few bits of social housing here and there’. Their argument is that because we’re getting 15 social homes here and 20 here that we have to allow this monstrosity. I’ve looked into this quite a lot, and what I have to tell people who are very angry about the position of the Mayor’s office is this. Kensington and Chelsea council are building barely any social housing at all – however, they are land-banking. They’ve been buying property and pieces of land for years, because they’re land-banking and waiting for the moment to change, because they want to build private homes everywhere and squeeze people on low incomes out of the borough. There’s absolutely no doubt about that, there’s been endless debates and information has been leaked to me about their project, which is to build the poor out, basically. But they have land-banked, and our argument should be that the council should be building social housing on these plots that they have been buying and sitting on for years. This is how we have to do it. But there has to be the political will from the top, and the way the council is constituted now, it’s not going to happen. But they’re going to get it in the neck from me endlessly, because I’m going to reveal where all these plots of land are where they could build social housing and are not doing it. The Mayor has just given the council a load of money to build new social homes, and one of their plans, which will happen over my dead body, is right next to the Westway in one of the most polluted spots in the whole borough. They want to put social housing right there, where there’s really filthy, disgusting air. And yet they’re sitting on plots down in Chelsea, at Chelsea Creek, where they’re refusing to build and just banking it. So they’re acting just as a property developer.