Where is the strategic thinking on planning?
PLANNING and infrastructure in our area: where is the strategic thinking?
Your nostalgic photographs on the Echo website showing the M1 under construction locally ought to focus minds on where we are now with planning and construction in this borough.
Most people have long since been reconciled to the presence of the busy M1 bisecting Loughborough and Shepshed. It is a transport artery of significant strategic importance to the country.
And it’s that word, strategic, that sums up how people form an opinion on planning and infrastructure developments in our area. Because it seems to many people who contact me, that there is no strategy behind most of the decisions locally.
Across the borough, from Shepshed to Sileby, housing is being built without adequate facilities or transport links.
Elderly, young or disabled people are often essentially cut-off through the cancellation of bus services or poor public transport. New retail or road developments in our town or village centres are allowed without proper regard for existing businesses.
Developments like the incinerator in Shepshed go ahead despite the impact on already poor air quality. And investments like electrification of the Midland Mainline, cancelled with the stroke of a central government pen.
The Echo’s letters page is often full of complaints about planning and infrastructure decisions. That’s because people cannot see how they fit within a strategic approach to how our towns, villages and communities can flourish sustainably. Stuart Brady, Labour’s candidate for the Loughborough Constituency at the next general election