By Concerned Resident,
The idea for this blog started after reading the one from 22 January 2025 about the origins of Barnet Council’s woeful finances (Capita), the armchair auditors that uncovered it (‘Barnet Bloggers’) and some of its legacies (the unaccountability of the Barnet Group/Council).
Crucially, it also referenced the (no longer new) Administration’s lack of interest in “critical scrutiny” and its failure to properly expose the finances it inherited, the disgraced former cabinet member for ‘Financial Sustainability & Reducing Poverty’ (ex-Councillor Naqvi) and the (then) forthcoming by-election in the (still!) super-safe Labour seat of Burnt Oak Ward.
The Leader of the Council was invited to write a guest blog, but from the look of it, he wasn’t keen.
So, I thought I’d have a go - only it won’t be in the Council’s defence, seeing as I happen to live in Burnt Oak and because what the Council is now attempting to do to Burnt Oak, is a symptom of what I now call, ‘Long Capita’.
Part 1: You can take the employees out of Capita, but can you take the Capita out of the employees? OR “Floodplain?! What floodplain?!”
A quick recap may be in order for those who haven’t been following what has taken place in Burnt Oak over the last few weeks and months.
Readers are no doubt aware of the jaw-dropping redevelopment proposals for Edgware Town Centre. But what people are barely aware of is the similarly jaw-dropping (but comparatively smaller scale) redevelopment for Burnt Oak.
The planning application for what is often unhelpfully referred to as the ‘Watling Car Park’ (“WCP”) redevelopment went out for formal consultation in late November 2024 and officially concluded in the first week of January. The “WCP” name is unhelpful, because it involves at least five sites not just the Car Park area. The other four sites are Burnt Oak Library (Site 2), a former builders’ yard (Site 3), plus two areas adjacent to the car park a car lot and fenced-off greenspace (which together with the car park are known as Site 1, which is the main site).
Developers propose demolishing the library and relocating it to the builders’ yard (which is on a residential side road, barely a 5-minute walk away from the current library). In its place, they want to build flats instead. If that wasn’t stupid enough, the worst of it is, they want to build flats, 6 to 13 storeys high on ‘Site 1’, which is on a functional floodplain.
The fact that the site is on a functional floodplain shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone, because Council minutes prove that this is precisely why Lidl failed to build on it in the noughties. Council minutes are silent about why Tesco’s/St James’s Investments failed to build on it a decade later, but we can guess!
The current attempts to build on the floodplain is all the more alarming because in 2021, the Environment Agency objected to the very notion of Site 1 being part of the Local Plan’s ‘Site Allocation’ list (although in that document it is known as ‘Site 6’). Their objections resulted in the Planning Department agreeing to remove the Site 6 from the Plan in September 2022, just before the Planning Inspectorate arrived to conduct Local Plan Hearings. As a result of the agreed removal, the EA did not need to turn up to the Hearings and make representations in person, for all to hear and see. This may have been seen as a win for the EA in policy terms, but problem for us is, their floodplain objections remained under the radar for another year, and unfortunately would have made it easier for interested parties to carry on with redevelopment ideas regardless.
Thus, in a parallel universe down the corridor to the Planning team, the “Re”-gen Department had their own ideas:
- Spring 2020: they invited developers to express an interest in the redevelopment;
- July 2020: H&G Committee’s ‘Development Portfolio Programme’ paper includes the Car Park along with another site, and the combined number of housing units is 300;
- June 2021: the disposal of the Car Park was approved at a Housing & Growth Committee meeting. Only at this point, the library site is included as part of the mix.
The inclusion of the Library is an eye-opener, because until June 2021 it isn’t mentioned. Furthermore, it doesn’t crop up in the first or second draft of the Local Plan. On top of that, EA’s initial objections to Site 6 (made during the first draft consultation of Jan-Mar 2020) only pop up in the papers for the Policy & Resources Committee, which takes place TWO DAYS AFTER the H&G Committee in which the disposal vote was taken!
So, the likelihood of any newbie on the H&G being asked to vote to dispose of the sites for redevelopment actually knowing about but the flood risk is likely to be nil: the officers report recommending disposal doesn’t mention it and the ‘Background papers’ list does not link to the October 2012 Cabinet & Resource Committee minutes (which provide chapter and verse about Lidl’s abandonment of its aim to develop the site and Tesco’s, presumably misguided interest in acquiring the freehold!).
If that isn’t iffy enough for you, bear in mind that the most of the above meetings are scheduled during a global pandemic, when the last thing the average person cared about was what may have been going on in largely obscure Committee meetings. And even the most committed geeks are unlikely to notice the blatant inconsistencies between the housing numbers fed into Regen-driven committee papers (which doubled in the space of one year from c.150 to 300) vs those found in ones concerned with the Local Plan (which dropped from 229 to 160 during the same time period).
Two years later, things get even more iffy, when, from Spring 2023, the redevelopment was introduced to the Council-sponsored Burnt Oak Partnership Board (“BOPB”). During the months that followed, the developers revealed their early proposals and then commenced their informal consultation (Autumn 2023). Not a dickie bird was spoken about the floodplain! But residents discovered the issue at the tail end of the consultation and fed it into their responses. It was not until December 2023 that the Comms Officer (who quit Barnet in the Summer - for a job as Head of Comms at a Property Developer!), dared to mention the floodplain. But the BOPB minutes neglected to mention anything he had said. Even after corrections were sent, guess what? Nothing again.
To misquote Suella Braverman (with whom I share absolutely no political allegiance whatsoever), “Pretending we haven’t got a functional floodplain, carrying on as if everyone can’t see that we have a functional floodplain, and hoping that things will magically come right is not serious community engagement”.
Then a rumour started -seemingly from within the Council, but diffused through residents- that the redevelopment was/is a “Foregone Conclusion” as. There is a kind of poor and self-sabotaging reasoning going on in the mind of any resident who goes around spreading this stuff, which I hope is rather obvious to this readership…
The iffiness didn’t end there. The start of the Council’s formal planning consultation (winter 2024) was inexplicably delayed for two weeks after the application was validated. This pushed the consultation period deep into Christmas and the New Year (instead of it finishing on Boxing Day). Again, normal or abnormal, who is likely to be noticing, let alone responding to planning applications at that time of year?
The only thing I can conclude from all the nonsense is the following: the WCP redevelopment phenomenon could ONLY arise and be sustained under a Capita (and later ‘Long Capita’) Culture, within which Officers have been stewing for years. Because to pursue what looks like some kind of “Shhh, don’t mention the floodplain!” injunction, then a super-injunction about NOT mentioning the mentioning of it, and then a super-super-injunction as if to gaslight everyone into thinking there isn’t one at all, is a kind of madness, both morally and legally.
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Concerned resident is a Barnet Resident. Guest blogs are always welcome at The Barnet Eye
