Architect Tom Young

SO, Camden is selling off our family silver again.

As the excellent letter (Come clean on the depot, March 16) from the Liberal Democrat opposition noted, Camden has this month granted Cllr Danny Beales sole power to sell off the Regis Road Recycling Centre and the Holmes Road depot without deferring to anyone else.

Cabinet papers say negotiations are far advanced with a “visionary” developer who will buy both sites.

Cllr Beales’s cabinet report gives two reasons for selling.

The first is not surprising if you know about the borough’s chaotic housing programme: this is a distress sale because Camden has run out of borrowing capacity and needs capital badly.

The other reason is even more telling about our political economy. Cllr Beales states openly he wants the buyer to buy out all the other site owners in the business park using the Camden depot sites as a ransom strip (for want of a better term).

The intention is to enable the buyer to exert pressure on other Regis Road Business Park owners to sell up is remarkable.

The fancy justification for it is that only a single owner can deliver the comprehensive, “transformational” development set out in the Kentish Town Planning Framework (2020).

Piecemeal development is the bogey here although all development is site-by-site, even at King’s Cross, which is the paradigm of good development for Camden’s executive.

In Gospel Oak, Camden’s own, single-owner comprehensive developments are dogged by delays and organisational failure, for example, the lack of a neighbourhood plan to make the most of planned interventions.

Problems of finance, cost, inflation and “viability” etc won’t go away because there’s one developer in charge. But is there something we’re not quite getting, which the soft talk about “transformatory” development obscures?

It is, after all, extraordinary that Cllr Beales and the Camden executive are trying so very hard to concentrate ownership in the hands of one owner in Kentish Town (when urbanism and economics tell us diffuse ownership and varied development are important strengths and components of robust places).

Taking a step back, one may surmise that Camden Council is facilitating the concentration of power in the hands of one developer because they have become so accustomed to dealing with powerful property companies at a high level, something they like celebrating with stories about their working alongside the King’s Cross developer.

Collegiality in the C-suite leads to deals and fellow travelling.

It’s a key part of the executive’s modus operandi (and career-building) in a way that now favours very dubious large-scale town-planning projects throughout Camden.

We’re barred as ordinary voters from seeing what’s been agreed. We’re asked to believe it’s all for the good.

I’ve asked Cllr Beales for the name of the developer who’s now on the point of signing a sale agreement for the two Kentish Town depots.

He demurs, claiming no deal has been agreed although the cabinet report about the sales states in black and white that an “exclusivity agreement” is in effect.

He refuses to divulge anything else. Only he, a few officers and the developer know but not the public. Of course not the public.

The sanctity of the deal is the blood pact between big real estate and Camden’s Labour leadership that protects both sides with “commercial confidentiality”.

Many of us look askance at this way of working because it is anti-democratic and suggests major town-planning schemes can be decided or “de-risked” long before they go before Camden’s enfeebled planning committee.