Happy New Year – we hope it will be successful one!
Update – The Legal Saga Continues:
Now EDC suggest we behave like them and discuss things behind closed doors with them! What a joke! Reluctantly EDC tell our lawyers they will supply limited information. Then they complain it costs money to provide that information. We say ‘Put the Masterplan in the bin’ then it won’t cost a penny more. They say ‘ We don’t like you sending all our letters to you to the Press. That means we can’t easily discuss things with you.’ We say: ‘Tough, you aren’t going to shut us up and we will continue being open and transparent and posting all the correspondence online for people to access and sending it to the press.’
You will find all the latest correspondence via the links below.
Thank you KPS for your continuing effort to ensure transparency, reason and democracy in a way which prioritises the needs of local people ahead of profit and contrived power-mongering.
While EDC plan for entire new villages none of us want, some of us want / need to make our home in (existing) villages, and for reasons that cannot be planned for in fine detail by a district council or anyone else.
If we have a genuine need, a site, and the resources to build if only a temporary home to meet that need, why does a local authority have the get so bent out of shape about it?
As well as meeting the needs of a family which the authority could never understand in the context of a ‘plan’, any new home supported at Parish level still brings council revenue and helps a community to thrive.
Some of us have existing commitments in existing villages and need to be close by for all sorts of personal reasons – it’s just how life is.
And while perhaps not fitting perfectly within a pre-defined “vision” such homes can contribute vastly more in practice to the claimed goals of reducing road congestion and environmental impact etc.
Planning for homes, and individual applications should be decided on need and impact. And even temporary homes which meet need for limited periods while such needs exists, should be supported where there is clear evidence there is contribution to strategic goals e.g. environmental and infrastructure (Road / car usage etc).
Reading about EDC’s goals on their plans and experiencing how they fight applications which actually meet those goals better than EDC’s own proposals, makes them appear, I have to say, bordering on comically incompetent.