Henry Lamprecht speaks with Cllr Edmund Frondigoun, Vice-Chair of Camden Planning Committee

Cllr Frondigoun has been a councillor since May 2022, so almost three years and was appointed to the committee, and he was made vice-chair pretty much as soon as he got elected.

Henry Lamprecht

Edmund, what would you say is the biggest challenge being on a planning committee in central London?

Cllr Frondigoun

I think the largest challenge is we get a lot of large-scale applications, as you can probably imagine, and obviously, a lot of it is land reuse. We don't have a lot of greenfield land.

So, obviously, there's a lot of balancing out a number of different areas, including heritage impacts, alternative land uses, again, the scale of applications as well. You have to go through them in significant detail. But, particularly at the moment, with the emphasis on mixed-use developments, there are a lot of different factors that you have to consider. It's not like you’re approving just a block of flats or a parade of shops. You have to look at that and the impact on the local infrastructure.

I think also that because it's within central London, there's a high volume of residential housing, even all the way down into Holborn, as you well know. Every application you do will have a material impact on somebody who lives within the area, and we have a very diverse mix of people.

We've got the young people, the elderly, less well-represented groups, et cetera. So I think you have to be very aware. It's not like where I used to live and where I cut my teeth, where there's a lot of open space.

If you're building houses anywhere in Camden, it’s going to have a significant impact on someone. For example, it's always going to be overlooking somebody's property.

Henry

That's very interesting to hear. You obviously did a lot of training to serve on the planning committee, but do you think there should be more training, and if so, what sort of training do you think planning committee members would benefit from?

Cllr Frondigoun

I think there should be more training and regular refreshers. I think there is a bit of a challenge that I'd like to take a detour with this question here, which is that a lot of the planning committee members we have in Camden and other authorities have full-time jobs. They’re doing this alongside their work.

So, if you're then having to add more training on for planning, it can be challenging to sync these diaries up or to find the time. Or even just if you're having to run something at six or seven o'clock at night, somebody's got to come in possibly from work, maybe they're eating something, or have to take the kids to school, and then just trying to get them to focus on some very, very key areas can be a bit of a challenge. So maybe training little and often would be more practical.

I think also that there needs to be a bit more bespoke training, tailored to the kind of applications that you get. So, for instance, within Camden, we have the Hampstead area, very old and Victorian, and there are lots of basements within that area, and there are a lot of properties where people will apply for permission to build a basement or extend the basement. That's quite a technical bit of work, and I think a lot of us, including myself and some people who've worked in planning, have found that we've done the general training before we sat on the committee, but we haven't had a chance to do specialist basement planning training.

And we were then looking at basement applications, and all of us found it really difficult trying to work out the heritage scale of harm versus subsidence, etc. So, I think that we need more training tailored to the kind of applications that we're going to get.

Henry

Yes, that's very interesting. You've got lots of technical reports as part of your committee pack; how do you deal with those?

Do you think it would be beneficial if you understood more of that technical stuff that's in those reports to help you make a decision? Because obviously, you have to just rely on the technical advice that's given in the report and that your planning officers are giving you.

Cllr Frondigoun

Yes, so I can't speak to other authorities, but I feel we're quite lucky in Camden that we've got a very good calibre of officer here. In terms of the officer reports that they provide, they're actually very easy to follow. Also, we do make sure that we have an independent technical assessor for certain areas, like a viability assessor.

We have a company called BPS for the independent viability check, who are always in the committee, where we have applications that may or may not have a viability issue. The same thing again, if we go back to the basement issue: we have a basement surveyor independent of the council, but we pay for them, to assess things and we find that quite useful.

As a a central London authority, we have the resources to provide that, and I know there are going to be a lot of local planning authorities up and down the country, especially in rural areas, where they may not have that level of detail. So, I think I could say I'm a little bit spoiled in that instance, If I were a councillor in a rural DC, it would probably be quite different.

Henry

It's a challenge sitting on a committee, when officers recommend an application for approval, and then there's a lot of public objection.

How do you approach that?

Cllr Frondigoun

I think there's a slight difficulty, and this is my personal approach. At the end of the day, we are a quasi-judicial committee and we do have to decide whether things comply with the relevant policy. And I personally am pretty strict on that.

I think one thing that we do with our local plan and our neighbourhood plan is to make sure that we do have pretty broad sights, discussions during the pre-application phase in particular, for mitigations and neighbourhood improvements. So we do have quite a significant pre-application process where we do take in residential feedback at the time. For instance, if we're talking about building massing, people may say in the pre-application phase, that this is very, very big. We do try to take that into account in discussions with developers and tell them that the massing is quite a significant problem. That's just one example.

I think sometimes it's quite difficult when you're in a committee to directly answer some of the objections that residents have. We all try to explore these objections with the applicant; sometimes it’s a misunderstanding.

In these cases, I try to tease it out in committee. Even if I can't answer it directly, I can try to at least take objections seriously and make sure they’re heard. This can be a last chance to get some answers to their questions. These are the kind of mitigations that we've got through Section 106, so construction working plans are a huge issue. People get very distressed by a lot of construction, so we make sure to agree a construction impact bond in Section 106.

That’s a kind a political management technique that I have within my own ward as where we have a lot of development. It does have a significant impact on people in the area, children, young people trying to get to school, so what is important for me is to be able to come back and say that it is very disruptive, but also you're getting a new school out of it. That's something we've achieved, a new children's play area, new parks, et cetera, and we say that this is how development is working for you.

Again, it's not going to answer 100% of objections, but I think that's a very important thing to make sure (this is going to sound a little bit trite, but this is my own personal maxim) that this is something that should happen, people should be a part of that, it shouldn’t be something that just happens to them, we could have done this and that they should be asking “what else can we do?”

But again, that's the luxury of having a central authority: as our land value is so high, we have a lot of leverage.

Henry

Your borough’s seen applications from fairly tall buildings that are quite often controversial.

Do you think the tall tower should be part of the solution to move more homes in London?

Cllr Frondigoun

Okay, I might need to give you a bit of an elongated answer to this one... You’re familiar with the joke, the guys are walking on the road trying to get to Dublin, they ask somebody how to get to Dublin, and he says, well I wouldn't start from here.

I think that probably sums up my attitude to tall buildings. Personally, I'm a little bit sceptical of them. There’s a lot of working around that you have to do.

I think they're not always the best solution for families and sometimes the size of the apartments is a bit constrained anyway. I think one thing that we do see is the loss of family homes within central London. If you look at the birth rates of young people since the last census,they have gone down, and what we build are like one bed and two beds homes, which naturally constrains family sizes. And particularly with the current leasehold model, and how a lot of them are built to sell, that sometimes can throw up some problems around service charges. People buy homes in buildings with lifts and suddenly really get hit with a really high service charges. And since Grenfell, with all the safety changes that had to be done, more and more space has to be given up to give additional stairwells etc. I think it's different now to when we were building towers. I don't hold this up as an example of good practice because 40, 50 years ago, it wasn't, with the idea of people sheltering in places of fire. If I could build a city from scratch, it wouldn't be the solution that I would choose. I may suggest the Parisian model for instance,where it's like slightly lower rise but more dense. But I do have to caveat that with space at a premium in London and land values are so high, we find that it's not viable for developers to build anything that isn't so many storeys. Given the choice between having housing, of which a significant portion must be social and affordable here, versus having none, unfortunately the choice is that you do need housing.

Henry

The Labour government has set a target of 1.5million new homes in their first term. Do you think that is possible?

Cllr Frondigoun

Do I think it's possible? I think with a bit of luck, in the right conditions, yes, it is. I do think that there needs to be more of a sea change across the board in terms of attitudes on housing from everyone to make that possible.

I think we need to not neglect the role of local authorities delivering housing. I think there are other elements within future legislation that will hopefully engender that, so do I think it's possible? Yes, under ideal conditions. That’s not going into the need for the economic situation to pick up as well; as we're seeing inflation's hit building, prices are really high. This affects the general affordability prices of housing and mortgage rates are still pretty brutal for the young.

I also have to say, as a renter with my partner, we like living in Zone 2. It's actually both of our jobs. My partner is a medical professional, so she's a key worker, and at the moment it's still really difficult for us to look to buy anywhere within London, so I'm very acutely aware of those pressures, but also what it's like on the development side.