Greenwich Council plans to increase the amount it charges large developers to build in the borough – but only in a handful of areas for big developments, it has revealed.
The council has been criticised for setting and sticking with a relatively low community infrastructure levy (CIL) – a bill handed to developers so they contribute to providing facilities around the borough.
Rates were set in 2015 and have not been updated since, despite the pace of development around the borough. The council has also been criticised for the comparatively small sums it has collected – with much of the money going to Woolwich Crossrail station rather than other needs.
But the results of a review commissioned last year mean that the highest rates – £150 per square metre for 10 homes or more – would be charged around Greenwich and the peninsula and around the Royal Arsenal in Woolwich. This is an increase from the current rate of £95.95.
Rates in the rest of the borough would be £96 – broadly the same as now, but an increase in Abbey Wood and Thamesmead, where developers pay £54.83.
Smaller developments of nine or fewer homes – where builders do not have to provide “affordable” homes – would pay £150 across the whole borough.
By comparison, Lewisham currently charges between £95 and £137, while Bexley charges between £54 and £82, once inflation is taken into account.
But rates vary wildly across London. This year Brent is charging a whopping £317 – meaning that developers could pay twice as much in Wembley as they would in Woolwich. And some boroughs – notably Barking & Dagenham – only charge very small amounts in an attempt to lure developers.
Greenwich’s new rates will have to go out to a public consultation, due to start this month. Then a hearing will be held with a planning inspector before they can be approved. The original cheaper rates in Abbey Wood and Thamesmead came as a result of an intervention by the inspector.
Revised rates are expected to come into force next year. The council had hoped to start its consultation earlier, but Aidan Smith, the cabinet member for regeneration, said last night that the turmoil caused by Liz Truss’s disastrous mini-budget had delayed the process.
“It was too risky to go ahead then,” Smith told the council’s regeneration scrutiny committee last night.
Thousands of homes have already been built, or are being built, in the more expensive area – zone 1 – but some potential development sites are still included, such as the old east Greenwich gasholder site; Enderby Wharf, where plans for a cruise liner terminal were axed; and the Greenwich Ikea car park, where developers have shelved plans for housing.
Any homes built on the Woolwich Waterfront leisure centre site when that closes would also be covered by the zone 1 rate – but a development across the A206 would pay the lower zone 2 rate.
The cheaper rate for the Charlton riverside reflects anxieties about whether large-scale development can actually go ahead there, with little cash for the infrastructure needed and some landowners seeing more value in keeping warehouses there.
Nas Asghar, a Plumstead Common councillor, queried why rates for Thamesmead – where councillors hope a DLR extension will get government funding and kickstart the huge Thamesmead Waterfront scheme with thousands of homes – were not higher.
She said that it appeared the new rates were “not up for negotiation” and asked: “If the public come back and say, we don’t like the new rates, they should be more, what will we do?”
Smith said that it would be down to objectors to provide evidence, and the report’s authors at BNP Paribas had been asked to find “a level of CIL that will not deter development”.
Asked if values in Thamesmead could be reviewed, Smith said that evidence of recent land sales would be needed. “That is not our choice, it is the system,” he said.
Full details of the rates can be found on the Greenwich Council website.
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