The following letter has been submitted to Barnet Planning by Brent Planning
Dear Mr Wyld,
West Hendon Estate,
West Hendon, London,
Thank you for your letter in relation to the re-consultation on amended and additional information for the hybrid planning application at the above site. This also responds
to the letter sent to us from Quod on 1O June 2013, in which they provide a response on the points
raised in our observation letter to Barnet.
Please find further observations on behalf of the London
Borough of Brent below:
(a) Tall Buildings
Section 10.6 of Barnet’s Core Strategy
discusses tall buildings and Barnet’s skyline.
It is noted that a Tall Building Study
was commissioned by Barnet Council,
which identified locations
for tall buildings
within Barnet. One of these
locations is at West Hendon (page 67 of the Core Strategy)
which makes reference to tall buildings ranging
from 8 to 20 storeys being appropriate in this location.
This application still includes proposals for buildings up to 29 storeys in height, which is contrary
to Barnet’s Core Strategy,
and still raises significant concerns.
(b) Nature Conservation
The points
raised in our observation letter
dated 29 April 2013 still
remain. We do however note that a number of statutory consultees have been consulted
including Natural England,
Canal River Trust and the Environment Agency.
(c) Transport
Bus Priority Lanes
Brent Council’s
initial observations advised
that Brent would not support
the removal of the short
sections bus lanes, as this goes against
current policy for the AS.
The addendum to the Transport
Assessment has not taken into account the concern around
removal of the bus lanes. In a couple of places
in the document, they make the following statement:
”The results show that the removal
of bus lanes, coupled with implementation of the improvement measures, along AS West Hendon Broadway will have benefit to overall journey time for either buses or cars whilst providing significant environmental benefits
to residential streets
and introducing significantly improved pedestrian facilities.”
If the bus lanes are not retained, then it is hard to see how the removal
of bus lanes will have a benefit to overall journey time for buses.
Parking Levels
The addendum to the Transport Assessment is still recommending an overall number
of spaces of 1600, which Brent Council considered as part of initial observations was rather high. Brent advised
that it would be
useful to understand if any of the Travel
Plan measures could reduce the overall requirement for parking spaces. The addendum
to the Transport Assessment does recommend that this amount
of parking be reduced, but it does not say by how much. The comments raised within the initial observation letter still remain.
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