A Mesage from the Pinkham Way Alliance
has arrived by e-mail:

You wait all summer for a planning inspector’s decision, then two come at once...

Last Friday was a big day. Inspectors reported back on two of the key planning matters that so many of us have put time and money into.


1. North London Waste Plan (NLWP)

The NLWP, which fixes a waste strategy for the seven north London boroughs for the next 15 years, has been more than five years in the making.

Nevertheless, as he suggested in June, the NLWP inspector has found the submitted plan to be legally unsound. The north London councils have failed to cooperate with their adjacent boroughs outside the capital, who receive a proportion of their waste.

The councils must now withdraw the whole plan and start again, or try to  fix this problem in order to resubmit the existing version.

Even if it gets fixed, the plan will inevitably be delayed by months, and we still believe that it’s fundamentally flawed in many ways besides this failure to cooperate.


2. Haringey’s Core Strategy (now called ‘Strategic Policies’)

At a hearing on February 22nd, we fought Haringey’s move to redesignate the Pinkham Way site as ‘industrial’. The inspector has agreed with us on this main point and has not permitted the council to make the change.

It was clearly a specious attempt to make the land suitable for waste management as required by the Mayor’s planning guidelines for London. As we pointed out at the hearing, this was tried after bullying by the North London Waste Authority (NLWA).

A consultation is now open on the inspector’s suggested changes to Haringey’s Strategic Policies. We’ll be submitting a response before the deadline of Friday 12 October. If the inspector allows, we’ll be asking you to sign your name in support.

We’ll be in touch again with more detail on these two big decisions.

In the meantime, despite the  positive news, we must all be very clear that this battle is far from over.

The NLWA are very advanced on  a huge procurement process that's separate from the waste plan. With the Pinkham Way preparation already done, they'll have nothing to lose by pushing on with the planning application if at all possible.