Greenwich Council has finally paid off the £15 million it owed towards Woolwich’s Crossrail station – 11 years after striking the deal that put the area on the Elizabeth Line map.
The town hall agreed a complex deal with City Hall and Berkeley Homes to get the station built because neither the Westminster government nor Transport for London included a stop at Woolwich in the original plans for Crossrail.
While the station has been an overwhelming success, with a queuing system put in place to cope with rush-hour crowds, Greenwich struggled to raise the cash from developers to pay its share of the bill – negotiating another two years to find the money.
The council finally paid the final £4.44 million by the end of March.
No other London borough had to pay towards having an Elizabeth Line station, although the City of London contributed to the cost of the whole line. Slow progress in paying off the bill meant Greenwich was unable to follow other boroughs in using millions from developers to improve facilities for residents.
Greenwich agreed to pay almost half of all its income from the Community Infrastructure Levy (CIL) – a charge on developers to ensure they contribute to local public services – towards the new station. It also agreed to charge a “roof tax” on developers in the Woolwich area.
Councillors decided to hold onto the rest of its CIL cash to underwrite the bill in case proceeds from developers fell short. Last year, a Labour councillor was told that CIL money could not be spent on a crossing outside Harris Academy in Eltham because it was all being held for Woolwich Crossrail.
In the end, the council dipped into £770,000 of this money to “forward fund” the bill because the roof tax had not produced enough cash in time.
The details appear in documents to be discussed at Greenwich’s overview and scrutiny committee next Thursday.
With the long-running Woolwich Crossrail headache out of the way, Greenwich now has a pot of over £10 million in CIL cash from developers to spend on projects across the borough – with about a quarter of that cash coming in last year.
The rates councils charge developers in CIL vary wildly across London, with Greenwich at the lower end of the scale after not revising its rates since 2015.
New rates – which would hike charges for housing in Woolwich, Greenwich, Thamesmead and Abbey Wood – are set to be imposed in the coming months but need to be reviewed by an independent examiner, who is holding a public hearing at Woolwich Town Hall on May 16 and 17.
Berkeley Homes, which is developing the Royal Arsenal and Kidbrooke Village; Knight Dragon, which is behind most of the Greenwich Peninsula; and the two Thamesmead Waterfront developers, Peabody and Lendlease, have filed objections, saying the rates are too high.
A number of residents have objected on the grounds that they are too low compared with other boroughs.
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