On March 12, the Enfield Borough Council planning committee approved the Royal Free’s application to build a new Chase Farm Hospital. This is long overdue and I’m sure it will be a good one. The school, too, is welcome. It’s the housing that’s the problem.

Enfield certainly needs more homes. There are many people, especially young people, who need homes of their own. So what they need is affordable homes. The redevelopment of Chase Farm is an opportunity to provide those homes yet the council has accepted that only 13 per cent of the 500 to be built need to be affordable, rather than the 40 per cent usually required.

The Royal Free claims that 13 per cent is more that it can really afford and has shared the calculations with the council officers, but only the officers. Planning committee members cannot see them and neither can the public, even though it’s our NHS negotiating with our council. And this is despite judgements by the information commissioner and the relevant tribunal in a case in Greenwich, and in at least four other cases than the calculations should be published. The tribunal judge said publication of the calculations would enrich the debate on an issue of considerable public importance.

The issue here is transparency versus secrecy. Whether two public bodies should be able to reach a private understanding to keep key facts from the public. And it is the result of a drift towards NHS privatisation which obliges a world-class hospital to think like a property developer.

It appears that elected politicians – the democratically elected servants of the people – must take lessons in accountability from an unelected and unaccountable judge.

Call me naive if you will, but I think that’s wrong.

It’s not too late to publish the calculations.

David Flint

Prospective Green Party Candidate, Enfield North