Hi All,

Unfortunately Redbridge council approved the plans for 1280 new flats (8 for and 3 against) in what can only be described as one of the strangest planning meetings I have ever seen. The biggest development ever in Redbridge should have been given more scrutiny than it was. A quick recap of some of the events:

• The panel members completely ignored our 3000 strong petition + 250 representations against the development on the plan itself
• The planning committee had 3 planning officers substituted without warning or explanation. The questions remains why? And whether they had time to catch up on the 2500 page planning submission or the 200+ pages submitted by our campaign?
• Simple questions were badly answered and then cllrs failed to follow up on the poor responses from the developers; eg: Will you still continue with the development if there is no second entrance for Goodmayes station? OR what if the residents don't want a CPZ because Tesco have failed to allocate sufficient parking or manage traffic flows?
• Three councillor's requests to defer the meeting pending further analysis was ignored
• Speakers against the development were given 2 mins to speak yet Redbridge council were allowed to do a 20-30 minute presentation in favour of the developers
• Our Academic speaker (Dr Mills) was blocked from speaking via video conference forcing us to read his statement from a piece of paper
• Our final submission report was completely ignored

The list goes on...

Next steps are to lobby the GLA not to approve the plans based on the poor level of scrutiny from the planning committee alongside the arguments in the report we produced. We are also going to start fundraising for a Judicial Review of the approval.

More news to follow....

Thank you for sticking with us!