Please keep sharing this petition so more people can tell the Examiners in Public of The London Plan, the GLA and the Council that their massive development plans for Kingston are flawed
The GLA confirmed today - at the Examination in Public of the London Plan's session on Opportunity Areas - that Kingston, as an Opportunity Area, is expected to deliver its "target" of a minimum 30,008 homes without Crossrail 2
I attended the session with the community alliance group, Just Space. Jennifer Robinson from UCL argued that the whole process of establishing Opportunity Areas and setting development targets for them is unsound and that all newly proposed Opportunity Areas should be withdrawn from The London Plan
I argued that the Kingston "nascent" Opportunity Area is particularly unsound and that there is an additional reason it should be withdrawn from The London Plan: because the GLA approved the Direction of Travel when it was still subject to call-in and because the purpose of the Direction of Travel - not to mention the document itself - was never clear.
Now it is blatantly obvious that the linking of Crossrail 2 with development around new or improved transport hubs in the Borough in The Direction of Travel was yet another distraction from the Council's determination to push through Opportunity Area status and a massive minimum growth target for Kingston in the London Plan without opposition from residents
In addition, I argued that the designation of Opportunity Areas in the Plan is unsound because the Mayor has failed in his duty to protect biodiversity in the London Plan by not carrying out a Strategic Environmental Impact Assessment or an Ecological Impact Assessment of development areas. I also asserted that case law states that surveys should be carried out before sites are designated for development. Given Opportunity Areas by nature are a form of permitted development in that they designate broad areas of land for mass development, the London Plan's designation of new Opportunity Areas fails on this count.