On Tuesday 21st January Camden Labour abused the scrutiny system to push through an ideological policy to extend Kingsgate School against overwhelming evidence that the case was flawed.
Labour members ignored the fact that the decision to extend the school by placing an infant and nursery building half a mile away on an industrial estate would put children and parents at risk when travelling to school on West End Lane. They ignored the fact that adding a further transition to pupils' lives when switching from Infants to juniors could impact on their progress.
Labour also relished the fact that the site would have to be cleared of the current local businesses occupying the site, shipping out well over a hundred jobs from the area. They also ignored the fact that the housing scheme designed to pay for the scheme allowed for no affordable housing, breaking the Council's own planning policy.
And the final insult to the West Hampstead community was the realisation that although the school could now be paid for by £6.7m funding allocated by the Coalition Government, the current proposals proceeded, unchanged by the scrutiny committee, to make the Council £9.7m profit to spend elsewhere in the borough.
So West Hampstead gets a potentially dysfunctional school, (with some Kilburn parents losing out on places when the admission point moves northwards), an over intensive private housing development, no affordable housing to sweeten the pill, and a decimated industrial estate no longer providing local employment.
The alternative case would be for a stand alone all-age primary school to serve the bulging pupil numbers in West Hampstead, which will grow further on the back of already committed housing developments. The Government money should be earmarked for the school and the rest of the site development could provide for a bigger industrial estate than the one currently proposed.
Why can't Labour consider this alternative? Because they are ideologically opposed to finding an acceptable partner to lead a Free School or Academy on the site, which is why they were not prepared to use the scrutiny committee for its intended purpose.
West Hampstead needs a new primary school that will be in place for at least 100 years, but we should not accept this flawed proposal.
