Press Release 5th Jan 2006
Stop The Tower, the local pressure group set up to fight Brent Council’s plans to build a massive tower block in Queen’s Park, responded today to Brent’s proposals on how the Stakeholder Forum, set up by Brent to discuss those plans, should be run.
Local residents are horrified at the idea that Genesis, a local housing association, might succeed in its planning application to build a 24-storey tower on the Queen’s Park station car park site. Brent Council supports and is actively promoting the planning application. The proposal is possible because Brent Council’s own planning guidance earmarks the site for adevelopment of between 15 and 20 storeys. Until that planning guidance is changed, the residents of Queen’s Park live under the threat of this multistorey development. The Stakeholder Forum was set up in the aftermath of public meetings held at the Queen’s Park Community School in November. Over 400 residents turned up to that meeting to express their outrage at the plans. The application has now been put on ice until just after the local elections in May 2006, when Genesis are expected to put in a new application. By that time, the Labour councillors who run Brent hope to be safely re-elected. Stop The Tower want the forum to be inclusive, representative and democratic. The Council has proposed excluding local residents from the consultation by restricting membership to one or two members of local groups such as Stop The Tower and QPARA. They propose the rest of the consultative group should be made up of people from Genesis and Brent Council Officers. Local elected councillors have also been excluded. Stop the Tower proposes that decisions made by the forum should be by simple majority voting. Any local resident should be allowed to attend, listen to the debate, make time-limited contributions from the floor and – most importantly – to vote. Access to local residents should not be restricted, just because they won’t tell Brent what it wants to hear.
“The clock is ticking on this issue,” said Stop The Tower member and local resident Vivien Kelly. “If Brent succeeds in stalling until after the election, there will be no pressure on them to listen to the people and change the planning policy. We can’t let Brent use rigged consultation to window-dress a decision that they’ve already come to. An open, democratic forum is the only way to ensure that residents’ voices aren’t drowned out by those with financial interests – namely, the Council and the developer.” Stop The Tower says that the Forum must focus first on building height, the issue which unites local opinion. It is Brent’s policy of putting up a tower block that inspired hundreds of local residents to object. Those were the objections which led Brent to set up the stakeholder forum in the first place. Both Genesis and Brent Council have a financial interest in the height of the building. Brent owns the site and has already entered into discussions with Genesis about selling it to them to allow the development to go ahead. Stop The Tower does not see how the forum can be a genuine local consultation if those two organisations hold a disproportionate number of votes on the consultative body. Brent Council continues to refuse to revise the Supplementary Planning Document’s height indication for buildings in the Queen’s Park station area. Stop The Tower will be calling for a vote on height at the next meeting of the stakeholder group.