There is a housing crisis in the UK with many people living in substandard and crowded accommodation. Distorting the national economy with wealth being transferred from those who have little to those who are very comfortable. Expensive housing pushes up wages, reduces peoples quality of life, and makes the UK uncompetitive.
One thing is clear, millions of extra homes need to be built in the in the South East where the jobs and opportunities are.
Previous generations ensured that large numbers of homes were built so that ordinary people could afford to buy a home and become financial secure. House building & home ownership was the single biggest welfare advance in the 20th century. This was done both by council house building and giving state funded grants to builders for houses that were under a certain floor area (the reason why so many interwar houses are so small).
This state intervention enabled the current property winners (people aged 35 plus) to own their homes. Now they have climbed the ladder many of them are actively participating in campaigns against house building which will mean many in the next generation will never be able to afford their own homes.
The Sandy Lane Action Group should tell us where they would like the extra houses should go – if they shouldn’t be built on brown field sites.
As for Tony Arbour, its his fellow Conservative Councillors up and down the country who are blocking house building in small towns and villages outside of London. These Conservative councils are campaigning for any extra housing to be built only on brownfield sites in towns - just like the site in Sandy Lane.
If the Tories on Richmond Council are to be believed in their claims on wanting to preserve the character of this borough and ‘protect it from developers’ they need to state where exactly they would build them. At the moment it looks like the Tories want it both ways – no wonder people don’t trust politicians.

Mr Rathburn makes some interesting points, so I would like to clarify the Sandy Lane Site Action Group’s position. We are not trying to stop houses being built on this site. In fact, I spoke (in my position as chairman of SLSAG) in support of Linden Homes’ previous planning application, at the November 2005 meeting of Richmond Council’s planning committee. Our support was a significant factor in the committee’s decision to approve the application.

This approved application is for 198 apartments, in ten four-storey blocks, with a three-storey nursing home opposite Bushy Park Road. The density is much higher than the surrounding streets, most of which are two-storey houses.

We decided to support this application because: we recognised the need for more housing (including affordable housing, which comprises 40% of the flats); we acknowledged that brownfield sites should be a priority for development; the developer made considerable efforts to talk with local residents and respond to their concerns; and we realised that the developer needed to recoup the costs of decontamination (the site is heavily contaminated as it used to be a gasworks).

While we decided to support the approved application – and Linden Homes told us that if the application were approved, they would not come back looking for more – we are strongly against the new application, which would involve the central block being raised to six storeys and four other blocks to five storeys (and then filling in the gaps between these four blocks to create two blocks running the width of the site).

This is not just because of the impact on the surrounding streets, although residents are understandably and legitimately concerned. It is because of the impact on the wider neighbourhood, schools (full), sewers (at breaking point), roads, parking, doctors, etc, and last but certainly not least Bushy Park. Thousands of people walk in Bushy Park each week and one of its main charms is the sense of seclusion and rural peace, which would be destroyed by buildings across the road towering over the wall (and I’m sure the developer wants the extra height because of the value of penthouse flats with a view of Bushy Park). There will also be the harm to the park’s varied and in many cases rare wildlife from the lights and noise from the extra storeys.

We need more houses, but this is not to say that developers should be able to build whatever they want. New developments must respect and enhance their surroundings if we are not to repeat the planning disasters of previous decades. This would benefit the people in affordable housing as much as owner-occupiers. Mr Rathburn rightly notes that the jobs and opportunities are in the South East – I believe the government’s priority should be policies to encourage those jobs and opportunities to be shared with the rest of the country, which would be socially equitable and would help lessen the housing crisis.

As far as SLSAG is concerned, this is not a party political issue. We presented the petition to Tony Arbour because he is our local councillor. We have also received important and very helpful support from our local MP, Vincent Cable, and he is a Liberal Democrat.