2,000 new homes will sweep green fields away

Raymond Leppard, conductor, Don Boyd, film director, Eric Carmen, singer, Hulk Hogan, wrestler and actor Joe Jackson, rock singer, Nigel Martyn, former footballer,

Nigel Harman, actor, Chris Hemsworth, actor I WALK my dog every day, one of my routes is Highmoor Lane, Jay House Lane, Thornhill and into Clifton. This walk is a pleasure.

Today, I imagined what this would look like if the local authority gets its way and puts 2,000 additional homes to create “Clifton Garden Village”.

No longer would I be looking out at green fields, I would see houses and an enterprise park with offices and factories.

It’s interesting how planners use terms like Garden Village and Park to mask their intention to change our environment.

They say we need to build for a growing population, true. However, what they don’t say is of 16,000 new dwellings in Calderdale, 6,000 are for Brighouse and 2,000 will be mostly on Greenbelt around Clifton.

This is a disproportionate amount of development around Brighouse compared with the rest of the local authority.

There is a strategic plan, which does not address the infrastructure problems we already contend with in Brighouse. Imagine driving in and out of the town with an additional 6000 homes – the M25 comes to Brighouse!

For now, I can still enjoy the countryside, but for how long? If this development happens it will start in 2019.

Change is inevitable and yes, we must build for an increasing population, but at what cost? My question is why do you think this plan looks after the interests of the people of Brighouse?

We need proportionate development across Calderdale to maximise the benefits for everyone.

So, how green is our greenbelt? MENTAL health, at last, is being taken seriously.

Being happy is the best and in a depressive state, leading to self-harm, is the worst.

So much has changed over the years for our kids and now they seem to have very little childhood before being subjected to mobiles and the internet, whereas before kids would be happy playing games outside, making them healthy and putting them in a good mental state of mind.

Now young kids live in a world of music and earplugs, many overweight on junk food and living in a world of very little communication.

It is not surprising that it is not the best lifestyle for them.

These kids are Britain’s future and deserve to be brought up without problems.