London’s controversial Garden Bridge has moved a step closer after Lambeth Council judged that two remaining planning conditions have been met.
At a meeting on Tuesday night, councillors agreed that conditions imposed when the Thames bridge was granted planning permission in 2014 have now been satisfied. These conditions related to scour and accretion and the management of users.
An artist's impression of the Garden Bridge
Councillors accepted a recommendation by officers that a ‘Scour and Accretion Monitoring and Mitigation Plan’ was sufficient to deal with the potential for the bridge to affect the Thames Tideway Tunnel super-sewer project and vice versa.
The plan will include the installation of physical scour protection around the bridge piers, extending to a radius of 12.5m.
The other condition was more controversial as the proposed ‘Illegal Trading, Antisocial Behaviour, Crowd Control and General Enforcement Management Plan' includes bans on such things as kite flying and playing musical instruments.
These were the last of the ‘referable pre-commencement planning conditions’ set when Lambeth council – one of two relevant planning authorities – gave the bridge planning permission in November 2014.
A spokesperson for the council told Transport Network that the remaining parts of the process include finalising the section 106 agreement and the submission and reporting of an Operations Management Plan (OMP) and an Operations Maintenance Business Plan (OMBP), which set out, respectively, how the ongoing operation and maintenance of the bride will be funded.
This will take place in the late summer and both the OMP and OMBP will be scrutinised by councillors.
In March Transport for London denied claims that it had inappropriately pressurised Lambeth to give planning consent for the bridge.
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