Wildlife would be driven out
Last week the County Times gave coverage and advertising space to a company which makes its profits from building new homes on green fields in the Sussex countryside.
Never mind that there are numerous brownfield sites in this county containing abandoned commercial and industrial premises – already connected to road and rail infrastructure – on which new homes should be built.
What seems to matter more to property developers is producing uniform box-type houses at the lowest possible cost for the highest possible return, while attempting to convince people that they are green after all.
Yet it is greenwash. You cannot build thousands of new houses on a green field and claim that the impact on the environment is ‘zero carbon’.
It is socially, economically and environmentally unsustainable. There are no facilities, no services, no work, no public transport. The nearest railway station to the proposed new town at Buck Barn is over six miles away. Are we supposed to believe that everyone is going to cycle into Horsham to get on a train?
Undoubtedly the development is going to bring increased traffic: after all, houses will have their own front drives for parking a car. Not only will there be construction traffic on the A24 and A272 for years to come, but a permanent increase in traffic; leading to frequent incidences of gridlock.
Cowfold already suffers with levels of air pollution which are too high. The removal of 375 football pitches of beautiful green countryside and persistent construction will extend the problem to Buck Barn.
The claims of the developers of the new town at Buck Barn that they can preserve some kind of wildlife corridor are laughable. You cannot put a housing estate in the middle of a wildlife corridor and expect the wildlife to be able to move unimpeded across it.
Is Thakeham really saying that some of the most threatened bird species such as nightingales, turtle doves and white storks (whose chicks have hatched at the Knepp estate for the first time in Britain for 600 years) are not going to be driven out of their habitats by the cats and dogs that come with great housing estates full of people?
The development of 3,500 houses at Buck Barn would cut off a key wildlife corridor linking the Knepp estate to St Leonard’s forest and the Ashdown forest beyond. Horsham District Council is indeed under pressure from the government to find new homes.
But if it were to allocate housing on the wildlife corridor, it would render the Government’s ‘25 Year Plan for the Environment’ meaningless.
DAVE TIDEY Vice Chairman, Save West Grinstead Action Group Three Cornered Platt, West Grinstead