Yet more student accommodation ...

IT has been a long time since I have used my spare waking moments to grace your pages.

Of course we 16 remaining permanent residents of the Hawthorn Terrace to East Coast Main Railway Line area of this once fine historic area of Durham City centre have more waking moments than we want, due to the round-the-clock anti-social behaviour of a large minority of our 500-plus Durham University Student neighbours.

I write following the recent planning approvals for student accommodation in Gilesgate and yet another incursion into the most constrained Green Belt in England, this time in Shincliffe Village.

The Area Planning Committees introduced by the unitary authority (imposed on us in 2009) have councillors from all over County Durham “so that we get what we want” to quote very senior officers at the time.

Therefore, by design, each planning application is determined by committees where the majority of councillors have no affinity (but often antipathy) with the community they are affecting.

The electorate affected have no ability to hold those councillors to democratic account.

Indeed, a leading councillor at the committee meeting dismissed the views of the MP, all four county councillors for the affected areas and the many residents who had spent huge amounts of time and effort grappling with the claims of the applicants as just “the number of likes and follows on Twitter and Facebook”.

Whilst I appreciate that our new administration has several huge problems bequeathed to them (after 12 years of the previous increasingly “tone deaf pretending to be Labour” lot) a robust democratic planning regime is the foundation of good governance.

Unless this is done speedily I am afraid the message from us few remaining good folk in Durham City centre to those of Gilesgate and Shincliffe Village is “welcome to our world” where everything you value is undermined.

MIKE COSTELLO, Viaduct Area, Durham City