Why are local authorities in London so keen to approve new housing applications, despite opposition from local residents?
It’s all down to the projected massive increase in population London is likely to experience over the next few decades. As a result, local authorities are expected to facilitate the building of 50 000 new homes every year across London for the foreseeable future. (See the London Plan for more details.)
Most authorities have been unable to achieve their targets, and hence are under pressure to approve developments. From their perspective, Penge is an easy target – a generally working class area with few resources where there is unlikely to be much opposition to new housing schemes.
Bromley are committed to provide a minimum average of 641 new homes every year for the next 10 years, and a quick and easy solution is to build tower blocks, so they are motiviated to permit all new develoment. if they could, they would agree to the concreting over of Crystal Palace Park! More on their plans here: https://planvu.co.uk/bromley/written/lp/cpt2.php
As previously stated, this scheme will not solve the housing needs of local residents – we estimate that the total number of homes in the affordable category (which is really meaningless) will be 87, of which 52 will be social housing/ shared ownership.