Regeneration

The challenge for the Westway Development Trust is always to continue generating income on a sustainable basis, to look after our land and buildings and deliver our charitable programmes. We have to make our assets work very hard which means running a continuous programme of regeneration and development.

In the past, public money in the form of regeneration grants assisted us in building new properties. In the foreseeable future, these grants will not be available. Therefore, we have to look to working in partnership with the private sector if we are to see new buildings being built, an improving infrastructure and an increasing rental stream able to keep up with the ever rising costs we face in delivering our charitable programmes.

During 2008/09 The Trust worked alongside the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea in consultations as to how the Trust land can be developed to fit in with the local development framework. In 2009/10 we will be submitting detailed planning proposals to enable this programme to happen.

We are continually looking at our charitable programmes. For example, to see if we should change some of our priorities to allow us to build upon our experience in community fitness and deliver some of the Borough’s healthy living programmes for them.

It would be easy for the Trust to dwell on its dramatic and interesting past, as a pioneer of local community ownership and social enterprise growing out of the major upheaval of the motorway being built across the wasteland in the 1960s. But, it is important that the Trust continually looks to the future and continues to deliver services and programmes relevant to the local community – after all we are scheduled to be here until the end of the century.