Just before Christmas we were pleased to see that the Council refused an application on Brighton Road to convert the basement to fourth floor of Capella Court into 132 studio flats.
The scheme was listed under Permitted Development rights to convert offices to flats and these flats were far too small and below the 39 square metres minimum space standard applicable to full planning schemes (normally Permitted Development schemes just need to show that the Council does not need to give planning permission and this system was used for all the office to flat conversions in Croydon town centre).
In this case though the developers provided only 19 car parking spaces for the 132 flats - far too few for the outer suburbs and, although the site sits on Brighton Road and is close to Purley Oaks station, the land quickly goes uphill both east and west of the old river valley. Thankfully, the Council decided that the applicant had failed to demonstrate that sufficient on-street parking capacity within the local area of the application site exists in order to accommodate the anticipated parking overspill generated by the proposed development. As such the proposed development would unacceptably impact upon parking stress within the locality of the site.
Local Councillors opposed the application given the high impact it would have locally and on the excessive overdevelopment being suffered by Purley from the building of flats (Purley is receiving 50% of all the new home applications for the entire Borough) so we were very pleased to see the application rejected.
Sadly, the developer has (possibly somewhat surprisingly) simply resubmitted their application again over New Year with the only change being to convert two parking spaces into car club spaces. Local Councillors are opposing the proposal again and we hope that the Council Planners have turned a corner in actually defending existing areas and residents and will reject the application again.
