Council conflict: housing crisis dashes Capital radio tycoon's dream of 10-bedroom, £115m Knightsbridge super-flat

A British radio tycoon who spent more than £100 million on the penthouse flat next to his London home in the hope of creating a 10-bedroom super-flat may be about to have his hopes dashed.

Westminster council’s planning committee is set to refuse Ashley Tabor the right to combine the two properties at The Knightsbridge, one of prime London’s most expensive apartment blocks, on the grounds that the project would result in a net loss of housing in the borough at a time when councils are under mounting Government pressure to increase their number of homes.

Mr Tabor, 36, is the founder of Global Radio which includes Classic FM, Heart, and Capital. He was awarded an OBE for services to the media industry in this summer’s Queen’s birthday honours.

In 2006 he spent £15.2 million on a four-bedroom apartment at The Knightsbridge. In May this year he bought a second, six-bedroom property for a reported £90 million — a reflection of how prices in prime London have escalated over the last decade. Stamp duty of £13.5 million pushes the second purchase above £100 million.

He promptly applied for permission to combine the two flats into a 15,000sq ft home, ten times the space in an average three-bedroom terrace house. It would create one of the most valuable apartments in the world.

Mr Tabor has a two-year-old son and his planning consultants, Gerald Eve, described the project as being necessary to create a “large, modern family home where the family could live separately from guest accommodation and other more public areas of the house.”

In a report expected to be presented to councillors, John Walker, Westminster’s director of planning, said: “The works proposed would amalgamate the two top-floor flats. There would be no loss of residential floorspace or bedrooms under the proposals, however there would be a loss of one residential unit.”

Mr Tabor has engaged the services of Christopher Lockhart-Mummery QC, a leading expert on planning law, who said that since there are “some 120,000 dwellings in Westminster” the loss of a single unit — or 0.0008 per cent of the total — would make no perceptible difference to the borough’s supply of housing.

He pointed to a series of cases where other councils have allowed two homes to be merged into a single, large property.