Renewal Area Update July 06

Had a briefing from the Renewal Area team last night. I understand the team are readers of this blog - so Roger if I get anything wrong please use the comments to correct.

The project should see £14.5m spent on improving Nunhead & East Peckham over the next few years. Most of that will be spent on improving the most run down residential streets with some external works for all the houses on the street and grants for more major improvements (like double glazing, rewiring) for poor homeowners (mostly pensioners). The project will also see significant investment in Evelina Road, Queens Road and Meeting House Lane. More background in previous posts here and here.

(You could also check out my new categories links in the sidebar, with thanks to David Nicholson)

I've become rather frustrated with the project in recent months as progress has been much slower than I expected largely due to recruitment problems and also changes to government housing health & safety regulations. More info on this here, here and here.

Anyway, I feel a little more positive following last night's briefing. The team still only has six members of staff rather than 10, but the other 4 positions are all being advertised with the job descriptions for two key positions having been substantially rewritten. The team are hopeful this will now attract some high quality applicants.

There also seems to have been some progress on training staff in the new Housing Health & Safety Rating System. This is an essential element of assessing applications for home improvement grants and without trained staff none of the applications could be processed.

Other key issues

It looks likely that Astbury Road and Colls Road will be the first area to benefit from street works. There was a public meeting to discuss this in June and a further meeting which I hope will confirm this will be held in Sept or Oct. Further areas to benefit will be announced in due course, they hope the next area will be confirmed in Jan 07.

There was a (not very well advertised) meeting in June to discuss public involvement in the Evelina Road project. The project team also announced at that meeting that there was at least £500k earmarked for work on the street. It's really important that as many people as possible have there say on this as Nunhead Green and the shops on Evelina Road are the heart of Nunhead. It looks like the next discussion about this will be at the AGM of the Nunhead Community Forum on 30 September.

The Queens Road project will be one of the most complex. The team have great ambitions to make Queens Road world-class (although I'm not sure I really know what that means). There are already a great many projects going on around Queens Road - eg the demolition of the Wooddene Estate, rebuilding the shops around Queens Road Station, a neighbourhood renewal project on the Cossall & Brimmington Estates, Wandle Housing Association building new homes - so the first challenge will be to bring all the interested agencies and to try to get all these projects working together. I understand an event will be held in Sept/Oct.

And finally street lighting. This is the greatest source of frustration for me as installing £900k of street lighting was supposed to be the quick win - the piece of work the renewal team would deliver in the first year. We're over one year on and still no new street lights. The latest news is that the team now plan to spend about £1.5m over the next two years on new street lights. The detailed plans have been drafted and they hope they will be approved by the Director of Housing at the beginning of September.