Housing plan could vandalise district

You reported Cllr Steve Williams (Con) saying the building of 5,000 homes in South Canterbury is inevitable (New Homes ‘Inevitable’, Kentish Gazette, April 10).

After virtual silence by ruling group councillors, it is good to see him commenting. However, it is a strange starting point for his constituents, if he accepts that premise.

He wrongly asserts that people want to move to South Canterbury, rather than the district generally.

The total house-building projection for the district again is a matter for further debate.

Even with the suggested road-building schemes, the congestion levels will still not be acceptable, as your correspondents have already pointed out.

Of my three ward councillors, one said the draft local plan must be satisfactory as it had been produced by professional planners.

The other two would not comment but merely advised me to comment, which I and many others have done.

Canterbury City Council chief executive Colin Carmichael again encouraged me to make comment and said the proposals were for discussion and not set in stone.

Now we have your report of the executive “rubber stamping” the officers’ plans (Plans Approved For 15,000-Home Urban Spread Before 2031, Kentish Gazette, April 17).

Apart from the inadequacy of the proposals themselves, council leader John Gilbey’s (Con) assertion that the plans must be right because of the huge amount of work done is totally unintellectual.

With any issue, whether it is a thesis or the future of our district, an effort is only of merit if the discipline and the brief are correct. Who do we now believe? The ruling group councillors don’t want to be involved and say that they are silenced by Mark Ellender, the council’s legal officer. To whom is he accountable? The council claims to be constrained by Government policy, but our MP Julian Brazier says he won’t get involved in city council issues.

So the buck is sliding off sloping shoulders as usual. Where is democracy? The fundamental omissions in the draft local plan are:

The proposed sites for development are landowner-led. The plan has included the whole of each landowner’s submitted site, without a proper impact analysis. Developers naturally want to maximise the use of their clients’ landholding. It should be the job of planners to assess whether that is right for the community.

The visual impact of development on each site does not address the council’s own landscape analysis.

The draft plan has no illustrations of the merits of the existing landscape or the impact upon it of development. The South Canterbury site is the only edge of Canterbury to be totally rural beyond the existing built-up edge and should be defended for that reason.

We appear to have yes men on the ruling councillor group, but maybe in next year’s elections we will say no to them.

In the meantime, they have taken the first steps to vandalise our district.

If the officers and ruling group members do not want an open debate, then the