IN DESPAIR OVER PLAN

WE write in despair and disillusion about the way Rossendale council has handled the Local Plan and in particular the devastating impact this will have on Edenfield if this scheme is put into effect.

For your readers memory lets just run through what the Council, OUR COUNCIL, wants to impose upon us.

They want to withdraw about 45 acres of land in the village from the greenbelt and have 438 houses built on it.

This will transform Edenfield for the worse by increasing the population by about 50 per cent and the built up area by nearly 100 per cent.

The Council in its consultation last Autumn asked what people thought about it and the answer came back loud and clear, over 800 objections came from our village which was almost 30 per cent of all objections from the Borough, and this from under 3 per cent of the population, the Council took no notice.

By comparison the Council has changed its plan in Whitworth, a much larger settlement than Edenfield, which produced about 100 objections, by leaving two plots for 120 houses in the greenbelt and moving a proposed Traveller site elsewhere.

We have asked the Council why it wants to use precious Greenbelt land for housing when there are Brownfield sites available, we have had no reply.

The Council has to demonstate that there are “exceptional circumstances” as to why it needs to take any land out of the Greenbelt as this should be a last resort.

In spite of this plan being in existence for over 12 months the Council has yet to make public what these “exceptional circumstances” are and to make this situation clearer, new government guidelines issued this week state that these “exceptional circumstances” should be “fully evidenced and justified”.

You would have thought that, given the site is so prominent and the impact on Edenfield so devastating that these “exceptional circumstances” were clear and obvious for all to see, but no they are, incredibly, still working on them.

In spite of this the Council saw fit to approve the Plan in spite of it being incomplete and lacking the vital information mentioned above.

Clearly the decision had been made long before anyone entered the Council Chamber.

The Free Press article (‘Town hall struggling to hit homes target’, July 20) included Councillor Lamb’s response to our question about traffic and terrible problems which we in Edenfield foresee as all the cars from this development pour out onto Market Street.

You do not have to be a qualified Planning Officer to see that 400 plus houses will generate many hundreds of extra car journeys every day.

But the Councillor’s response was of the “it’ll be alright on the night” variety, saying that the developers will deal with it after OUR COUNCIL has released this land from the Greenbelt, by which time it will be too late.

Surely if it is possible that traffic MIGHT make the the plans unworkable, then the answer is to put in place a full study to come up with the answer NOW rather than leave it to “providence” as Councillor Lamb and the Council would seem to prefer? Paul Bradburn Edenfield Village Residents Association