But in the right place

Stagecoach are no good. Can they cope? We need an answer.

Where there are plans, like banning right turns at the traffic lights on New and Old Dover Roads, how do residents in the Nunnery Fields area get to their houses or how do ambulances, let alone people, drive to the hospital?

It’s the same story at Thanington. No detailed plans for a Wincheap relief road nor a new junction onto the ring road. The new A2 slip road will bring huge amounts of traffic from London but there are no plans showing how it will join the A28.

All these problems may have solutions but they may not. All should have been resolved before any planning consent was given because if they are insoluble it will be too late.

So, where do we build lots of houses? Well, a proper garden city approach. A new community big enough to have its own selfsufficient range of social facilities – shops, leisure, medical centres and schools.

A large enough critical mass to make public transport viable. Ebbsfleet is the obvious place to sort out Kent’s problems because Maidstone, Tunbridge Wells and other towns face the same problems as us. Ebbsfleet has the M2, M25, an almost unused high-speed railway station and lots of brownfield land. They have £530m from Westminster for further infrastructure improvements to build 15,000 houses. Inexcusably, Canterbury plans to build 16,000 without a penny. Ebbsfleet could be three times bigger. Then we could build about 10,000 houses in sustainable places in our district.

Finally, let’s repopulate the city. I welcome the flats in Whitefriars and Longmarket, the redevelopment of Stour Street.

Let’s build above shops. The new developments in Station Road West, the Tannery and Bingley Island have been good sustainable places to build. This can bring conflict, with a latenight economy which is sadly not Tony Blair’s dream of a cafe society but a rather more violent one based on alcohol. So it’s good to see the council trying to address something they have allowed to happen.

It won’t be easy putting the drunken genie back into the bottle but it has to be done for the health of all our people. Clubs and pubs are welcome but if they cause problems then they need to pay a late-night levy, as they do elsewhere, to make good the litter and damage they cause.

Perhaps it’s too late to achieve some of these ideas. It’s certainly not too late for others. Is some of this a vision? Maybe. But I’ve never considered it a bad idea to have a vision. Perhaps that’s where politics comes in.

‘Even our little decisions can affect your life more than anything Westminster does’

Cllr Nick Eden-green