Greenwich Building Fiasco Shows Importance Of Access

When new buildings are constructed with multiple floors, the importance of access has to be considered. This is a matter of planning law and failures by developers to meet the needs of those with limited mobility can have significant consequences.

There have been few cases of this as exceptional as that of a three-tower, 204-unit apartment scheme built in the Greenwich docklands, which the council has just ordered to be pulled down. The local authority stated it had never previously imposed a planning enforcement order on anything of this scale.

Developer Comer Homes Group was slated for at least 26 features of the Mast Quay Phase II development for failing to comply with the details agreed upon in the planning application that was agreed in 2012.

These shortcomings were wide-ranging, but several were specific to people with reduced mobility, including a lack of disabled parking spaces and no step-free access either to the communal gym or many of the apartment balconies.

In modern developments like these, such failings are major issues and in this particular case, the developer is set to pay a huge price.

However, while new homes can be built to certain specifications with mobility needs in mind, older properties are not, which is where a stairlift can offer the sort of modification needed to ensure people living in such homes can enjoy easy access between floors.

Many new homes are not fully equipped for the needs of the disabled either. Under the planning rules introduced in the 2018 National Policy Planning Framework, local authorities have to plan for a mixture of homes of different accessibility levels based on demographics.

While that may work well at a population level, it will still mean some individual homes are not ideally suited and can need an adaptation.

Thankfully, modern stairlift technology means these can be fitted in places where it was once hard to do, like curved staircases.

So, while Comer Homes has to demolish its Greenwich development and re-think how it serves those with mobility issues, in many homes a stairlift can provide a much simpler solution.