Speeches+-+Phil+England

Sustainable Haringey was formed in March last year and is a network of community groups and residents from across the borough who want to help make Haringey sustainable.

Sustainable simply means "can continue on into the future". There are many things about our modern lives which mean they can’t continue indefinitely into the future – or indeed for very much longer into the future at all.

Things like climate change, peaking energy supplies and rising fuel bills, wars over the remaining oil supplies, a rapidly expanding global population and consumption-focused lifestyles that require three planets when we only have one - all mean that we can't continue doing what we've been doing in the recent past. Change is inevitable. And if we grasp the opportunity now to design that change then we can make sure that it’s a future that provides a better well being for us all.

At our meeting in January the Sustainable Haringey network agreed to support the Wards Corner Community Coalition and the Alternative Plan. We also agreed to encourage the coalition to integrate maximum environmentally sustainability features into the design - ideally we would like to see a zero carbon development – one that is built to high levels of energy efficiency and with renewable energy generated on site.

So in this spirit we hope to continue working with coalition - to add detail and substance to the general principles expressed in the initial planning application so that the plan is as sustainable as possible and doesn't compromise the ability of our children to provide for their needs and their well-being.

I understand that the Coalition will be also be working with the Glass House charity to enable the community deepen their joint vision and develop the detail of their plans.

Furthermore links have been made with Bioregional – the consultants who developed the first Zero-Carbon development in the country at Bed Zed in Surrey. Bioregional have expressed an interest in working with the coalition as the project develops.

So there is the unique opportunity - if the council were only to grasp it – for a genuine community-led design that can be a model sustainable community in this borough. One of the foundations of a sustainable future is a network of strong communities. If we can talk to each other and develop solutions together locally then we are better prepared to deal with the shocks that lie ahead.

Ward Corner Community Coalition has already put together a remarkable group of people from right across the community. It is getting people together and facilitating communication between groups that might otherwise remain isolated.

The Grainger Plan does not have that same support of the community. Rather the community has united to oppose it. All the key stakeholders that Grainger has has identified and sought to engage with - except for the New Deal for Communities quango and the Area Assembly - oppose the Grainger Plan and are part of the Community Coalition.

Rather than building a sustainable community, Grainger plc wants to ignore its concerns, serve an eviction notice on some of them, demolish their physical base and disperse them without any kind of relocation plan or compensation.

Two final points:

Grainger’s idea to bring in big name stores which will syphon money out of the local community. Large chain stores, rely on long-supply chains and other unsustainable practices that are likely to come unstuck in the short term. Small local businesses and new future-proofed social enterprises support the local economy by keeping money in local circulation.

Finally – a significant part of the Grainger scheme that is unsustainable, is the massive concrete foundation structure that is required by the Grainger Plan to support the demolition of the Wards Corner building and the new development that will replace it - requires huge amounts of cement. Cement production produces between 5 & 10% of the world’s man made carbon dioxide – the main greenhouse gas.

It is this part of the plan also that Grainger blame for making the scheme so expensive that it say it is insufficiently profitable for it to be able to build any affordable housing on the Wards Corner site.

A scheme run on a not-for profit basis without demolishing the Ward’s Corner building as is proposed by the alternative plan could surely be in a position to provide affordable accommodation on this site.