Deprivation

Published: 15 July, 2010

• PETER Brayshaw, writing in a personal capacity (July 8) about the UKCMRI plans for a super lab behind the British Library, surely got things a bit wrong about the planning guidelines for the site.

Put in by a Labour administration, endorsed by a Liberal Democrat-Conservative one, they were not written “for” a specific development in their inclusion of 50 per cent housing, of which 50 per cent should be “affordable”, for this was/is the norm for larger developments.

If UKCMRI are demanding this requirement be torn up, despite overwhelming need for more social and affordable housing in this and adjacent wards, it would be they who are asking for very special treatment.

Yet they knew the guidelines when they bought the site.

Obviously they cannot put housing onto the site with the laboratory, but they can and should provide, as other developers do, for the housing quotient to be met elsewhere.

The members of the consortium are seriously engaged with research to improve health.

They are already present in this locality and conversant with its health problems and therefore of the need to overcome in local ways the early mortality, high suicide rates and other deprivations of the people living here.

This includes not merely the bugs and drugs of their endeavours in the lab but also the impact of their development, the environmental and social background to health, including, of course, housing.

They have already progressed a long way with the architecture (though it looks dreadful in a blue light) and in considering some community provisions and I simply do not think it is fair of Councillor Brayshaw to suggest that it is beyond the capacity of this brilliant and, one would assume, socially-minded bunch to arrive at an acceptable solution consistent with their reputation and the needs of the locality rather than simply putting down the jackboot.

MIRANDA MARTIN
Churchway, Somers Town