THREE years and three months after Waverley Council granted landowner sanction to Crest Nicholson Sainsbury's original East Street plan, a scaled-down version of the proposals has been granted the same status. At a council meeting on Tuesday, borough councillors voted, with just one abstention, in favour of the sanction. Thereby they have given CNS the go-ahead to submit a detailed planning application for the scheme with its reduced number of flats, smaller cinema, decked rather than underground car park and, in some cases, lower building heights. Members of the East Street Action pressure group who attended expecting a debate, did so in vain. Not a single councillor took the opportunity to speak, leaving it to council leader Richard Gates to "sum up" before the vote. Earlier, however, the campaigners had made use of both informal and formal public question time to grill the council on various aspects of the East Street project. Mike Murphy, who said it seemed CNS would walk away with "at least £20 million profit", while Waverley would be lucky to break even, asked for a full breakdown of how much council tax payers' money had been spent on the scheme, from the initial conception to the present time. Mr Gates replied, with regards to the potential profit, that "financial details remain exempt and subject to a conditional contract". But with regards the costs to date, there is the interesting prospect of these being quantified. Mr Gates said he had asked officers to provide the information Mr Murphy has requested, though he added that "officers' primary task at the moment is taking forward the revised scheme". Also emerging from the questions was the information that Waverley is to retain the freehold of the entire site, granting CNS a 150-year leashold interest under which the basic rent payable to Waverley will be a percentage of the commercial market rents received. Other questions covered such issues as parking, loss of trees, the wisdom of building apartments and the wide range of figures that have been bandied about in relation to the cost of renovating the Redgrave Theatre. In his later summing up, Mr Gates stressed that none of the previous schemes for East Street had included a theatre. And in the nine years since the theatre closed, he asserted, there had been no sustainable arrangment proposed which would not result in a significant call on council resources. In agreeing landowner sanction, councillors were endorsing the decision that there would be no theatre, he pointed out.
