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I was pleased to see that Menta withdrew their plans for redeveloping parts of Cherry Orchard Road just before the planning committee meeting where it was due to be discussed, with the planning department recommending refusal. The plans really were quite ridiculous in so many ways.

The Labour Party was the first to take the credit for this, closely followed by the Liberal Democrats. The Conservatives were more restrained in welcoming the withdrawal and also more accurate, because the recommendation for refusal was based on the failure of the proposals to meet a number of technical requirements and absolutely nothing to do with any lobbying or public opinion at all, though the opposition was noted. Menta's own comments about the lack of support from the Council at the last minute seem to just be nonsense given how many major legal and technical flaws were highlighted.

One of the most ridiculous parts of the proposal was the lack of car parking spaces. Only about 373 spaces were proposed to support somewhere of the order of 1,500 households and also retail and office space. Given the obvious need to be completely self sufficient in car parking provision, spaces for at least one car per household and preferably two would have been more realistic, and that is without the needs of those working in the development and visitors. The astonishing thing is that the proposed number of spaces apparently meets the appropriate guidelines and so was considered acceptable which suggests someone needs to have another look at the guidelines. Worse still TfL actually would have liked it to be a car free development because of the supposedly excellent public transport links. Yes the site is well provisioned with buses, trams and trains but they are already running at over 100% capacity without having to cope with a massive new development. Even if they had the capacity it wouldn't remove the need for private transport. What planet are these people on?

Another absurdity was that the plans included relocating the Royal Mail delivery offices to the site of the present meat processing plant. This sounds fine in principle, but it turns out the plans don't meet the Royal Mail's requirements and they objected to the scheme. They own their current site so it seems the Menta plans were even more fanciful than first thought as they didn't even own the land they want to build on or have the current owners on board.