With a government inspector now considering Kensington & Chelsea Council (RBKC)’s New Local Plan proposals, more details have emerged showing the extent of the local authority’s deception over the historic community building, Canalside House. Despite the building not being on the site of the huge Kensal-Canalside development, the council has adjusted maps and refused to engage with local groups in a bid to force the sale and demolition of one of North Kensington’s last remaining community assets.  

“Do not need to demolish”

Since we revealed in February that RBKC had cut a secret deal with Ballymore for the sale and demolition of Canalside House, resident organisations have received no new information from the council’s Deputy Leader Kim Taylor-Smith who is also Lead Member for Grenfell Housing and Social Investment. In the absence of proactive council leadership, residents have organised meetings with the developer, Ballymore, and analysed RBKC’s New Local Plan to better understand their predicament.

The situation faced by Canalside’s third sector groups has gone full circle back to September 2018 when Cllr Taylor-Smith told them that “part or all of the building will require demolition” to “maximise the density of the Kensal Gas Works development.”

It turned out this was wishful thinking on Taylor-Smith’s part. On 27^th November 2018, planning officers from the Kensal-Canalside Opportunity Area Development Team met with Canalside House residents and informed them that the building “does not need to go in order to deliver the site.” The team, who had spent months surveying the site reiterated that developers “do not need to demolish” Canalside House. They expressed frustration that senior councillors had not told the residents about this and had allowed them to suffer months of anxiety knowing all the while that Canalside House was not on the planned development site.

On 3^rd December 2018, at the council’s Housing and Property Scrutiny Committee meeting, RBKC planning officers stated that the demolition of the building was unnecessary, and that the development on the Gas Works site could proceed without it.*

No Explanation

Cllr Taylor-Smith then stated that the council had “no plans whatsoever” to sell or demolish the community centre. He promised investment. But throughout 2019, 2020 and 2021, Canalside House enjoyed few improvements. Residents suspected that Taylor-Smith was looking for a way to offload the building, yet the council spent around £600,000 on new windows, so it was also possible that the improvements were just proceeding very slowly.

In October 2022, RBKC published its Local Plan proposals, setting out its intentions for the borough in the coming years, including three major developments: Lots Road, Earls Court and Kensal-Canalside. The Local Plan map shows Canalside House inside the Kensal-Canalside development area, contradicting the information given to local communities by planners, council officers and politicians.

No explanation is given in the Local Plan as to why Canalside House is included or how the decision to include it was reached. The images below from RBKC’s submission to the government.

In late 2022, shortly after RBKC’s New Local Plan was published, Canalside House residents were literally frozen out of the building. For the duration of the Winter, they went without heating and hot water. They were switched back on the week after we reported the council’s secret deal with Ballymore.

A planning expert we spoke to confirmed that Canalside House is outside the site allocation and was brought into the site at a late stage. This means the planners who drew the maps made a mistake or intentionally sought to deceive the government’s inspectors.

Resident organisations at Canalside House have not had a chance to raise any of these issues. They were not consulted on RBKC’s decision to pursue the sale of their building to Ballymore; they were not informed about the Local Plan and its implications for their ability to operate; their rights and protected characteristics as set out in the 2010 Equality Act were ignored by RBKC; and even if they had felt inspired to read the council’s New Local Plan and looked closely enough at the map to see that a black line had swallowed up their building, they would have found no explanation in the document as to what the council’s decision making process was. In its Local Plan, RBKC fails to identify any potentially negative outcomes for communities in the creation of a new neighbourhood in North Kensington.

Government Inspection

At the time of writing, the government inspector is about halfway through her nine days at Kensington Town Hall analysing RBKC’s New Local Plan. She has 173 questions for the local authority.

In the morning session on day one, three RBKC planning department employees represented the council. They were Jonathan Wade, Head of Spatial Development; Preeti Gulati-Tyagi, Planning Policy Team Leader and Chris Turner, Senior Planning Officer. The officers claimed that the council had gone above and beyond its duties in its Statement of Community Involvement. In the case of the Canalside organisations and the hundreds of local people who rely on them, this could not be further from the truth.

We asked Kim Taylor-Smith for a comment on the council’s failure to engage with resident organisations, in accordance with RBKC’s post-Grenfell policies. In reply we received a message from the council’s communications team that provided no new information. Cllr Taylor-Smith has not taken up the suggestion of the resident groups to arrange a meeting with them.

We’ll have more on RBKC’s bid to get the sale of Canalside House past the government inspector soon.

By Tom Charles

@tomhcharles

*(At the same meeting, RBKC issued a ‘Lead Member’s Update’ document that made the claim that the council had engaged with the grant maker Tudor Trust to provide a lift inside Canalside House. This came years after Canalside resident organisations had secured £100,000 from Tudor Trust to install a lift in the building to improve access for disabled visitors. The council, under Taylor-Smith’s predecessor Rock Feilding-Mellen, rejected the grant, preferring to keep Canalside House in managed decline. It is not known whether Feilding-Mellen or any of his colleagues considered the inconvenience and discomfort caused to disabled people by their decision. The 2018 claim made by Cllr Mary Weale, that RBKC was working towards installing a lift, was entirely false).