Kingston’s planning committee will decide on 11 November 2026 whether to approve 92 flats on the derelict Rose Lodge NHS site in New Malden, with no affordable homes on site. Planning officers have recommended approval, a recommendation that advises members rather than binding them.
The application would demolish former NHS buildings at Rose Lodge and the Roseland Resource Centre, which were declared surplus in 2012 and closed in 2013. South West London and St George’s Mental Health NHS Trust sold the site to the developer KK Investment Ltd in 2014.
The plans are for two linked blocks of up to eight storeys, containing 92 flats above a 32-space basement car park.
The 32 basement spaces work out at roughly one for every three flats. The site is already in residential use, as houses in multiple occupation, and the application would replace that arrangement with self-contained homes.
No affordable housing is proposed. KK Investment Ltd says independent viability assessments found that providing affordable homes on the site would be unaffordable, and it has offered £753,000 towards off-site provision instead. Officers accept that offer as the affordable housing contribution the scheme would carry, a sum equivalent to about £8,200 for each of the 92 homes.
The five-year supply test
Officers concluded that the development would help meet housing need in a borough where the council cannot demonstrate a five-year supply of deliverable housing sites. That failure weighs in the planning balance, because it narrows the grounds on which affordable housing can be demanded from a scheme of this kind.
The supply position is a matter of arithmetic rather than argument: the council either has the deliverable sites or it does not.
On the wider effects, officers found that the adverse impacts do not significantly or demonstrably outweigh the public and planning benefits. The recommendation turns on that judgement rather than on any finding that the scheme is exemplary in design or tenure.
The decision falls days after the same council confirmed that 151 of its own homes had stood empty for at least two years. Of those, 122 are on the Cambridge Road estate. More than 1,000 households in the borough live in temporary accommodation. Both cases involve the same tension between homes that exist, homes that could exist, and households waiting for them. The comparison is not exact: one concerns homes standing empty, the other homes never built.
What happens next
Councillors meet on 11 November and are not bound by the officers’ view of the application. Whatever they decide will turn on the viability evidence, which is the developer’s, and on the weight they give to the borough’s housing supply position. Members can also defer the application if they want more information.
If permission is granted, the £753,000 would be collected for affordable housing elsewhere in the borough rather than on the Rose Lodge site. The scheme itself would contain no affordable homes, a distinction that matters to anyone expecting it to include social rent. The site would deliver 92 homes at market terms, on land that has stood largely out of use since 2013.
The unresolved question is how a borough that cannot show a five-year supply should treat a scheme offering no affordable homes at all. The committee’s answer will be a local one. Authorities across London that cannot demonstrate a five-year supply face the same question about how much affordable housing they can insist on.
