Altaf Hussain

Speaks about the cut in number of new homes planned for the Salt Lake site

NEWS that Bridgend County Borough Council has cut the number of new homes being planned for the Salt Lake site in Porthcawl is welcome.

The public consultation into the Porthcawl Placemaking Plan produced a lot of opposition to the proposal to provide more than 300 homes on Salt Lake. BCBC has responded by cutting the number by a third. Part of the site will now be used to create what the council calls a linear park running the length of the site fronting the sea which will provide additional space for recreational and leisure uses.

But the proposal to build new houses over almost all of Sandy Bay remains in the plan. It was proposed in the LDP that Porthcawl was to get 1,100 new homes spread over the two sites. About 800 were planned for Sandy Bay and the remaining 300 or so at Salt Lake. Taking out 100 of these at Salt Lake may mean that the overall figure is reduced which would be welcome or it may mean that more will be squeezed into Sandy Bay in order to keep the total up.

Porthcawl people believe that this figure – whether 1,000 or 1,100 – is too high and that the town cannot sustain such an increase in its population – estimated at something like 18 per cent.

My main concern as a doctor is that the current medical services in Porthcawl will not cope. There are already insufficient doctors based at the health centre and I have asked CTM Health Board for the up to date figures of how many GPs we have in the town compared to how many we should have.

So how will our services manage if they are to deal with an extra three to four thousand people? Bear in mind that for the major part of each year, our flexible health services have to stretch to cover an extra 15,000 people staying at the Park Dean Holiday Park. While this peaking in the population has taken place in summer for many decades, it is a factor which may not have been considered in the calculations done by planners into how Porthcawl would manage its population increase.

Adding another couple of thousand people to the permanent population could put too much strain on public services in Porthcawl unless there are plans to increase capacity in our GP and dental surgeries and I have seen no plans to do this.