A woman who has lived on the same council estate for 30 years has taken developers and her local authority to the high court over plans to demolish her home.
Aysen Dennis, 64, is fighting to keep her two-bedroom council flat on a south London estate and says plans for redevelopment amount to “social cleansing”.
The landmark case concerns the Aylesbury estate, once the location of more than 2,000 council homes, and comes amid a wider trend of social housing being replaced with expensive private properties.
The second phase of a project to bulldoze and rebuild what was once one of Europe’s largest council estates is controversial because it proposes cutting the number of social-rented homes in favour of shared and private ownership.
There are currently 327 social rented homes and another 46 sold under right to buy on the site. The proposal is to replace them with 614 new homes, only 163 of which would be socially rented, though 50% will be classed as “affordable”.
Southwark council and Notting Hill Genesis are both named in the claim which was filed in London’s high court on Tuesday morning.
The claim argues that the council was unlawful in granting an application to tweak the wording of the original planning permission to regenerate the estate. The change makes it easier to wave through new projects that differ from the original masterplan.
Dennis told the Guardian: “It’s more profit for the developers because they keep changing the planning application for the developers to make more money … It’s not just concrete walls and profit. What about the human beings who are affected by all this gentrification?”
Lawyers say those made to leave their homes since the project started were not consulted on plans that differ from the original permission. Gains by residents – such as restricting the height of buildings to 20 storeys – could be lost with a 25-storey all-private tower, which is the proposed centrepiece of the next building work.
Dennis said that despite the estate’s notoriety, she did not want it to be destroyed. “My flat is wonderful. It’s all big windows and all day I get light. And the community I live in I love.”
Developers have increasingly been relying on “drop in” planning permissions to change parts of large developments that are inconsistent with what was originally allowed.
Saskia O’Hara, one of Dennis’s lawyers at the Public Interest Law Centre, said: “It is already difficult for communities to play a meaningful role in the planning process, and this is never truer than for a resident of a London estate which has been a target for demolition by councils and private developers over decades. Developers should not be able to sidestep the findings of the supreme court and have a free pass to change what was promised to residents in the historic planning permission.”
A Notting Hill Genesis spokesperson said they were considering the court documents and were “very proud” of the next phase of the project which would deliver “high-quality, safe, energy efficient and warm homes to replace the existing homes which are no longer fit for purpose”.
They added: “We are committed to creating a fantastic, thriving mixed community with quality public space, top-class facilities and improved play and sport areas.”
Kieron Williams, the leader of Southwark council, said: “We’re working with residents on the Aylesbury to build new homes for them to move to, with more new council homes on site being built on the estate than on most others in the country, as well new housing association social rent homes too.
“We’re building these replacements because the original homes on the estate were badly built in the 60s. All of the phases meet or exceed our planning policy requirement for half of the development to be affordable homes. We measure this by the total number of ‘habitable rooms’, because our residents need family-sized homes and councils that just count the number of homes end up with lots of one- and two-bed flats that are no good to families.”
