Reject this plan (From Barry And District News)

Reject this plan

10:01am Thursday 1st November 2012 in Letters

IN response to Redrow’s claims that the only reason they submitted a planning application to develop fields to the west of Port Road was because the land had been identified by the council as suitable for development in the LDP earlier this year.

Wenvoe Residents’ Action Group would like to point out that the council identified the land as “suitable for residential development” as part of the LDP only from Phase 3 (2021 onwards) if all other more suitable sites in the Vale had already been used and if there was still a pressing housing need, and that Redrow have been compiling their case to eradicate these fields, meadow and woodland since at least 2010, as shown in their supporting documents.

The application for outline planning permission is clearly opportunistic in the extreme. Redrow says that they are “keen to answer any concerns”, but no one from Redrow has approached WRAG to ask what villagers’ concerns are, and had they read the article published in the Barry and District News (October 18) they would have been able to read some of our concerns and get our website address (www.wenvoerag.co.uk) which quite clearly lists our objections.

We understand that the revised LDP is due to be published next month, but sadly, despite Labour’s encouraging pledges before the May elections, we now have no confidence that the plan will have been properly taken “back to the drawing-board”, as promised by Labour earlier this year.

We have yet to see any evidence that anyone on the council at any point has either asked the WG if they are able to scrap the LDP and start again or question whether 10,000 new houses are really required in the Vale over the next fifteen years, which is what was reported Neil Moore said they would do when he became leader of the council.

We are sincerely hoping that the VOG council are taking their responsibilities as seriously as they should and have made themselves fully aware of the Planning Inspectorate report of 1999 in which it was stated that Wenvoe needed protection from “inappropriate development in the countryside” and that “any further residential development of Wenvoe should be strictly limited to the area within its settlement boundary”.

The Inspectorate further recommended “that the area surrounding Wenvoe, outside the settlement boundary, should be designated green belt”.

If recommendations by the Planning Inspectorate are simply to be disregarded when the council so chooses (which is what has happened for the last thirteen years), what is the point in having them there in the first place?

We very much hope that sense will prevail in the forthcoming months, both in the council rejecting the current Redrow planning application, and in them removing the site entirely from the LDP when it is re-published and including a green belt for the eastern Vale.

Elizabeth Mildred Chairman, Wenvoe Residents’ Action Group