Members of your committee, affiliates and resident groups around two primary schools – Avonmore and Flora Gardens – were concerned to see the revival of an unreconstructed Community Schools Programme on the recent council cabinet agenda.

Community Schools Programme – proposed Avonmore Primary School. Note that most greenery is actually Marcus Garvey Park

The agenda item was in effect crystallising the May 2022 Labour manifesto into council policy. However, we wrote 4 letters to the council and an article on the subject in 2020, highlighting concerns about the proposal to develop school land, and doubted that the policy was either wise or even justified on a number of specific points of planning and development practice.  Furthermore we are aware that other options have been tabled at both locations and rejected by the council.  Early consultations were curtailed by the pandemic, and specific promises were made by the council to pause and continue the conversation before proceeding.

To date, this has not happened, although some undocumented discussions amongst various parties have taken place. Under the circumstances we saw little option but to make a formal deputation to the council meeting, re-iterating community concerns, and making the following points:

1. 1. We, and the groups we represent, are fully supportive of cost-effective rebuilding, but not at any cost (financial, environmental, or loss of land or school amenity space).
   2. No response has been received to the 4 letters of March – November 2020 – this was acknowledged and a formal response is now expected.
   3. A consultant-led housing and school design programme was commissioned, and at £2.68m, has overspent its allocated budget. Yet consultation has been patchy, partly because of the pandemic, and a long list of concerns from different groups had been raised, many unanswered.  The resulting conventional bricks-and-mortar, carbon-intensive designs (illustrated) are compromised in both housing and school terms, partly because of school safeguarding issues, and because there’s a distinct lack of space. The housing lacks amenity space, the Avonmore school loses open space and all its trees, and has a rooftop ‘playground’ cheek-by-jowl with the housing. This is described by the council as ‘the best’ way to rebuild, without transparent evaluation of alternatives. There’s more than a whiff of overbuilding in these proposals, particularly at Avonmore, which is a highly constrained site in a very dense urbanised area in which there’s already precious little green space. The bottom-left third of what you see in the above CGI, and all the trees, are actually in the small Marcus Garvey Park adjacent.
   4. 

      Private Eye 2019 “Playing Field Towers”

      Building housing on school land, is a principle we don’t generally accept (though noted to be under way with usual overbuilding and concerns about playing fields replaced by a rooftop playground in Mayoral opportunity areas such as White City). Such overbuilding has not been shown necessary if like-for-like replacement or similar is the proven requirement – this can be achieved more cost-effectively. New generations of offsite-constructed modular timber buildings offer low-impact, practical, very green, quickly constructed, and affordable solutions. Many UK councils and international bodies have been building school buildings like this for some time, and these are a very different proposition to the ‘prefabs’ of the past, of which Flora and Avonmore are worn-out examples.  Some Grand Designs are built this way now, not that either site needs a Grand Design as such, just good cost-effective environmentally sound learning spaces.

   5. 50% of the proposed housing is for market rate leasehold sale, representing the sale of precious school and public land. You decide where this fits on your moral compass, we remain unconvinced.

   6. LBHF spends around half the national average of its Section 106 funds on “education”. Section 106 are legal agreements raising funds from developers on larger projects, such as the West London Courts development, to mitigate planning deficiencies. An adjustment to the S106 spend could cover rebuilding – the borough currently has £55m available of which 33% is allocated to affordable housing, but a tiny 3% to education.

   7. A recent World Economic Forum report indicates that technology change and modern industrial strategies – to which the council is signed up – require continuous learning for people to remain employable in the evolving world of work. The design and use of the schools as learning facilities that also provides affordable access to accelerated learning for wider segments (those adding and building new skills in order to rebuild or sustain their attractiveness for work) should be considered.

   8. In its same manifesto, the council proposes 3000 welcome new affordable homes, several hundred examples of which are on its own Town Hall project, a stone’s throw from Flora.  This plan alone would require 750 additional school places in a conventional sense, or 3x Flora Gardens capacity, notwithstanding any extra places required by the proposed housing as part of these schemes. Therefore, permanently losing open or expansion space, and on awkward sites, and particularly to generic housing similar to that being built en-masse elsewhere in the borough, particularly around White City, might appear a town-planning mistake.

HammersmithToday and ShepherdsbushW12 have reported our concerns in some detail.

This was not the forum, nor was there time for extended discussion in a somewhat rushed 45 minute meeting, and we were disappointed to not be able to continue to extend our olive branch.  Worryingly, it felt as if the subject was closed,  the programme appearing to be rather more focussed on affordable housing provision than effective school rebuilding, which is what the community and the schools have asked for, and is, after all, the name of the programme.

We call on the council to engage openly and transparently with us and resident groups seeking cost-effective solutions that work for all.