YourSay Page

The Your say Page is where we list your comments and opinions. Below are a few we have picked up already. Please Contact us and add some more.

...'Affordable housing' - mine will be affordable if Red Mist gets the Green Light.

...How much of this new housing is for us?

...It is to be built on the City boundary so they can hand it over when finished.

...I simply do not believe my Borough of Charnwood is falling for this.

...Did Dave Hankin really say Red Mist came within 200 metres of Barkby Thorpe?

...Do these people have no feel for heritage and tradition?

...Why are we letting Whitehall do this to Charnwood?

...After the Barkbys go down, Queniborough and Syston will be next.

...No borough's planning department can cope with this one.

...A piece of vandalism on a gothic scale.

...Did I miss the word 'eco-friendly'?

...The police have to come out to the ASDA exit in Thurmaston to release the cars from the car park at least every other weekend. Just picture another 5,000 houses!

...If the development of the houses on the Barkby Road at Syston is anything to go by, it will be dreadful - 3 storey dwellings 10ft from the road - no frontage to speak of and houses crowded together. Who wants that? I shudder everytime I drive through there on my way to the General Hospital where I work. As I drive home through the road narrowing at Thurmaston I breathe a sigh of relief to see the open fields - it is immediately relaxing and it would be a crime to build on it. At night the "barrack block" at Hamilton is lit up and looks a monstrosity and an affront to the countryside it overlooks. How can we have more of it? I say NO NO NO. Mrs JB, 27/02/2009

------------------------------------------------------*----------------------------------------------------------

If you would like to leave any comments here for us to put on line then please leave your email address and a short message for us. Or if you would like to help the cause in some way, then please please leave a message... We would love to hear from you all about any issues, so, please, don't hold back.

Even better than writing to BABTAG would be to write directly to your Borough Councillor or to the Director of Development, Mr Dave Hankin. Our Democracy Page (Local Councillors section) in this website gives their email and postal addresses and a full list of all 52 Charnwood councillors may be obtained from the council website www.charnwood.gov.uk

Below we give a sample letter to a councillor, listing 12 points you may care to draw on in any message you send. You should ensure you identify the proposal concerned and ask for a reply, as indicated below.

If you wish to download the sample letter as a Word Document then please click here

Dear ...

CHARNWOOD 2026-The SUE proposal east of Thurmaston and north of Hamilton

In 2010 you will be taking part in a crucial vote at Charnwood Borough Council that will determine the future of south Charnwood. Your vote may well decide whether the area remains a collection of villages in a rural environment or whether it is consumed in a huge urban extension to the Leicester conurbation.

Before you vote on the proposal to build 5000 new homes to the east of Thurmaston and to the north of Hamilton, I ask you to:

1. Question the housing figures imposed on Charnwood by the East Midlands Government Office.



2. Seek an explanation why precious countryside is being yielded by Charnwood to accommodate Leicester’s housing needs when there are thousands of vacant properties in the city and county.



3. Be aware that green fields near Syston and Queniborough are being targeted by developers as well as farmland east of Thurmaston and north of Hamilton.



4. Be aware that Charnwood’s own traffic consultants now favour a much larger area for development than the one heavily publicised in the Charnwood 2026 public consultation process. If this area which joins on to Syston is adopted should not Charnwood start a new public consultation process?



5. Note that the Transport Assessments commissioned by Charnwood actually lead to increase rather than a decrease in traffic congestion in the development area which is already suffering from badly crowded roads.



6. Note that neither the developers nor the council have sufficient capital to pay for the infrastructure costs of a 5000 dwellings development. So why go ahead with such a grandiose scheme when it patently cannot be afforded?



7. Dispute the planning orthodoxy that there is no alternative to SUEs (Sustainable Urban Extensions) and where housing is absolutely required locate it in smaller sites where infrastructure costs are less or existing infrastructure can be used.



8. Check that flooding and run-off from 5000 dwellings has been properly calculated.



9. Resist the loss of 284 hectares of productive farmland.



10. Reject the view that village identity can be preserved when 200 metres is the Planners’yardstick for separation from a new town of 5000 dwellings.



11. Value and protect the heritage and ecology of the rural haven surrounding Barkby and Barkby Thorpe.



12. Prevent further urban encroachment on an area that has taken more than its fair share of development in the last 30 years.

A reply to this letter is respectfully requested.

Yours truly,