How can it be great news for Calderdale?

PEOPLE concerned about the climate and environmental consequences of the still draft Local Plan (Planning Inspector outlines findings into Calderdale’s Local Plan to build thousands of new homes March 24) might be reassured by Calderdale Council’s statement that ‘We particularly welcome the Inspector’s finding that the council’s overall proposals were based on sound evidence’.

There’s only one problem: the inspector’s letter about the Plan doesn’t actually say that. Maybe the council could explain the discrepancy? This really matters because so many of the criticisms of the Plan made by environmental and community groups have precisely been about its failure to be supported by credible evidence. For example: that there’s no modelling to identify its impacts on carbon emissions.

That information about rising road traffic, as a result of the many road schemes the Plan proposes, was deliberately not disclosed, despite repeated requests.

That government statistics that Calderdale’s population has stopped growing, crucial to the calculation about the number of new houses being pushed onto our Greenbelt, have been set aside. Instead the Plan maintains that population will grow by some 20,000 over the next decade, but can’t say where these fictional ‘people’ will come from.

And, we argued, the economic analysis underpinning the entire Plan was out of date and based on the wrong targets: Calderdale static working age population doesn’t need more jobs, it needs more productive and well-paid ones. So claims that the Local Plan will ‘protect our beautiful countryside’ and that it will provide the ‘infrastructure required to support this growth’ are just so much disinformation.

How can it be ‘great news for Calderdale’, as the council claims, when it’s just hiding the huge, but also entirely unnecessary, environmental damage that it’s imposing on our future?