Suchalife

Please be careful using this sort of language:

Without necessarily being prepared to hug them, most Councillors and council officers will also value trees as part of making "Lewisham a more attractive place in which to live and work". Their challenge is to balance this 'good' against competing 'goods' such as finding people places to live, which becomes ever more difficult as people want to live in smaller households - so requiring more dwellings per person. It is a particular problem in London, since so many people want to live here. So what you call 'influence' may in fact be reasoned argument based on a full understanding of a council's planning policies - and reasoned argument can often be quite influential.

OTOH, there can be bad planning decisions - and I would say this one, the subject of heated discussion on STF was one such, but I think it would be quite wrong to jump from cases where officers seem, however clearly, to be incompetent, to any suggestion of corruption. I even think it would be unfair to say that individual officers are incompetent - just as likely they are over-stretched or poorly managed.

In such circumstances, real, effective policy amounts not to what is written in documents such as the one you quote, but in what gets enforced, which is why I asked about the record of Lewisham in following up TPO breaches. If the truth is that developers can get away with breaking the rules, or pay nothing more than a fine which is less than the additional value they can squeeze out of the development thanks to the breach, then the policy is a dead letter. Actual policy become a matter of how enforcement priorities are decided - on which I am not aware of any documents open to public scrutiny.

However, when a council also has policies, imposed on it from above, to get flats and houses for many thousands more people constructed, then it may well see this as a good reason for quietly ignoring the implications of planning regulations such as TPOs - and rather wishing that people who make a fuss about them would just go away.

My understanding is that the Coalition government - as part of its localism agenda - is moving away from these centrally imposed housing targets, and instead paying Councils a certain amount for every new dwelling that gets built - more here. The author of this article calls this bribery, but doesn't think it will be enough "to influence councillors who will lose their council allowances if voted out by angry residents opposed to development."

I'm afraid I'm not quite sure where this leaves us in Lewisham. I very much believe in relatively densely populated cities as part of how humanity can survives in a sustainable way, and I want to see as much greenery as possible in such cities. But to get there, it is worth trying to understand the realities for Councils.