I would like to wish everyone a happy and prosperous new year.
To begin on a personal note, New Year's Day is actually my mother's birthday, but much as I would love to be with my mum for her birthday I had already returned from Brighton after Christmas and spent a quiet new year's eve at home in Hanwell. This month also saw my father's 70th birthday but unfortunately once again I was unable to celebrate it in person with him as I was in London while he was in Brighton before he flew back to Spain a few days later. With a General Election and local elections due, this will be an important year for me politically and fortunately my family understands how much this means to me.
This month I attended the last Elthorne ward forum before the local elections. Of particular interest was a presentation on the proposals for the Green Man Lane Estate redevelopment. The Green Man Lane housing estate in West Ealing is poorly designed, plagued by drug dealing and badly in need of regeneration. Undoubtedly its residents deserve better.
Ealing Council, in conjunction with their nominated developer, Rydon Homes, is therefore planning to build 721 new homes on the site of the current estate and the Singapore Road car park. A new planning application is due to be submitted in February and, if approved, building work is due to commence later this year in October or November and take about eight years to complete.
The scale of this development will certainly have a huge impact on West Ealing and it is understandable that local residents living in and around the estate have concerns about the plans, the disruption caused by the building work and the impact of the new estate on local services, car parking and traffic.
However, as I mentioned at the meeting, I also have concerns that there will be an overall reduction in social housing being provided on the new estate. The Council is proposing to reduce the numbers of affordable homes from 464 on the current site to 418 in the new development while at the same time building an extra 303 units of privately rented accomodation.
In my opinion, the Council's argument that this decrease in the number of properties actually represents an increase in the number of habitable rooms for social or affordable homes is just a smokescreen. I believe that once again Ealing Council has caved in to the demands of the developer to maximise their profit from the project and my view is that any new development should provide at least the same numbers of social housing as the existing site, if not more.
The other important meeting in January was the selection of our local election candidates in Elthorne ward. After a contested selection, I am pleased to say Peter Hutchison, Dave Randles and myself have been chosen to represent the Lib Dems in Elthorne. The three of us all have a strong connection to the area, and between us we have lived in Elthorne for over 40 years (Dave has lived here the longest at 20 years while I have been here for 11 years and Peter 9 years) . Geographically we are also well spread over the ward as Dave lives in Felix Road in West Ealing, I live just off the Uxbridge Road in Hanwell and Peter lives in Olde Hanwell. When you think that none of our current councillors actually live in the boundaries of Elthorne, I think we can justifiably portray ourselves as ideally suited to represent local people.