The Crawley Observer has a story about an application to turn Grade II listed Broadfield House into apartments.  Looking at the plans the proposal is to cram 12 apartments into the building, which will mean, I guess, that there is no obligation to include any affordable housing at all.   The publicity came about because a lady who used to live there was visiting the place and saw the planning notice stuck to a lamp post.

A spokesman for the council said:

It looks like four or five trees may have to be cut down to make way for a car park, but this is not a decision made by the council.

Eh?  This is surprising for two reasons.  Firstly its a surprise there are any trees there to be cut down after the recent butchery and ground-clearance related to work on the flood management side of the pond.  The other surprise is that the cutting down of trees is nothing to do with the council.   It may well be that the application is being made by the lessees of Broadfield House, a recruitment company, but the actual land owner that they lease the building from is… Crawley borough council, who also make the decision on the planning application.  If the council’s planning committee feel that losing trees is unacceptable they just turn down the application.   If the council generally don’t like the trees being lost they must have some influence as landowners. Saying it is not the council’s decision is just plain wrong.

Only a month ago the Tories listed as one of their promises to ‘fight unnecessary developments in Broadfield’.   Here we have a development of what will probably be ‘luxury’ flats: certainly not the affordable housing for key workers or youngsters that the area really needs.  Not only that, but the plans could involve losing some of the few trees which survived the recent work there.  Not only that, but access to the site seems to be from the A23, despite there being room to use Highwood Park as the access.

Back when the Highwood Park development was still at the design brief stage it was made very clear that there should not be access via the A23 for several reasons.  One was so that the new development would feel like part of Broadfield and not be isolated.  Mind you, it was also made very clear that there should be traffic calming on Woodmans Hill as a planning condition and that never happened since the developers wriggled out of their section 106 agreement.

Making a real mockery of the spokesman’s comments, the plans show that the development includes land that is not currently in the lease for the building.  That means that the whole thing can only go ahead if the council allow more of the current public area to be enclosed as part of the private development so whether the trees are worth keeping or not there is no way they can say it is not their decision.

No doubt the fabric of the building will be improved by re-development, but the whole place is going to be surrounded by a great big fence obscuring half of the facade.

So to sum it all up, there is an application to provide more housing of the type more likely to attract people into the town than to meet the needs of those already here, it will result in the loss of some more trees,  partially obscure the facade of the grade II listed building, remove (an admittedly) small part of the park from public use, and have no connection to the community of Broadfield as access will be from the A23.  No doubt there will be some financial benefit to the council as landowners, even if only for the agreement to enclose extra land.

It ticks all the boxes for ‘unnecessary development’  so I expect the three Broadfield Tory councillors, one of whom is part of the executive, to be fighting this energetically as they said in their (illegal) leaflets last month and if they cannot persuade the planning committee on June 2nd to turn it they should be persuading the council to not sell/transfer the land needed for the application.  I expect it in the same way as I expect West Ham to win the league next season.