Property Week: Developers face "stumbling block" in H&F

Property Week is reporting that CapCo, the developers persuaded by H&F Council to take over and redevelop the West Kensington Estate, are set to face what they call a "stumbling block" which I reported here, of residents actually being able under new legislation to take their own estates over and effectively evict the Council as their landlord.

What I find interesting about this article is not so much that this is now a problem for the developers, which we knew, but the last lines of the article which read thus:

When it bought the 23 acre Earl’s Court site in 2007, CapCo had originally planned to limit the redevelopment to the 7m sq ft that it owned.

However, in 2008, Conservative council leader Stephen Greenhaugh persuaded Capco to produce a more ambitious single masterplan that encompassed the council blocks and 23 acres of Tranport for London land.

So even the developers weren't as mustard keen to see the estates knocked down and rebuilt as our very own Council Leader was, in the full knowledge that the residents were likely not to like it very much!