Please come to next week's Council committee meeting on 28 March 2019 at 19.30 at The Guildhall to hear about our council's plans to "consult" on its massive growth plans for the Borough.
Please ask your friends, family and neighbours to sign this petition to stop the over-development of Kingston. Let's show the Inspectors of the London Plan that thousands of people know what is going on and that enough is enough.
The document: "Early Engagement for the Local Plan" being discussed at the meeting next week is a new name for the Issues & Options document for large-scale growth across the Borough, including on large sites and in the as yet undefined "Opportunity Area", that many of you joined me in calling in in December 2018.
The council says that "This will be the first public consultation on the new Local Plan for Kingston Borough, thereby allowing the community to shape the document from the outset."
This is not true because the council has already agreed with the GLA that we should become an Opportunity Area and has already agreed densities on large sites throughout the Borough that have been instrumental in forming our new, extremely high housing target. They are telling us that we have to build 30,008 units of housing and asking whether we prefer to have them on large or small sites or on the Green Belt and on Metropolitan Open Land.
But there is no real choice.
You can find the details of the call-in, most of which were completely ignored with no justification or evidence, at:
http://kingstonindependents.org.uk/press-releases/291/
Councillor Kevin Davis - who led negotiations with the GLA for the "Direction of Travel" document with Councillor David Cunningham, who in turn chaired the Growth Committee that in October 2016 approved the Direction of Travel that has set us up as an Opportunity Area for large scale, dense development across the Borough - was Chair of the Scrutiny Panel that ruled on whether the Direction of Travel was sound.
The new LibDem administration support the designation of vast swathes of the Borough as an Opportunity Area, despite the fact that the huge development that comes with it - in scale and type and location across the Borough - is not linked to us getting CrossRail 2 and was never consulted upon.
Despite the council's assertions that our development figures have been "forced" on us by the GLA, they, and agreed densities for large sites, were decided by our council officers with GLA officers behind closed doors on the basis that we will be an Opportunity Area. Think Croydon, think Vauxhall.
Think a minimum of 9000 homes and 5000 jobs on large sites in the "opportunity area" alone. Given small site development is unlikely to happen on any significant scale*, we can assume that the majority of 30,008 new homes being built on the large sites that our council has already put forward to the GLA.
*You can listen to the session on small sites at the Examination in Public of the London Plan here: http://bit.ly/EiPSmallSites
The other thing the council is not mentioning in the new Issues & Options document is that we will have to build a further 16,309 homes if we do get Crossrail 2. And the evidence base for the new London Plan (the Strategic Housing Land Availability Assessment 2017) says that this will happen by increasing further density on large sites which have already been discussed with Boroughs and which they consider capable of supporting additional development.
In the case of Kingston, our council is also considering developing on a large scale in the Hogsmill Valley and on the Green Belt if we get Crossrail 2 and are asking that the GLA consider lifting protection of such land as an "exceptional" circumstance. GLA and Kingston Council officers have already agreed possible densities on these sites in arriving at the additional housing target we will need to meet with CR2 that is given in the SHLAA.
The council will be speaking about developing on Metropolitan Open Land and the Green Belt next week on Tuesday 26 March 2019 in the afternoon (starting at 2pm) at the Examination In Public of the London Plan. You can follow proceedings here: https://data.london.gov.uk/dataset/london-plan-eip-2019
Don't be fooled.
We need to tell the council, the GLA, the Inspectors of the new London Plan and the press that this an abuse of the democratic process. They have already decided what is happening to Kingston.
We have no say.