Alliance ‘in denial’ over road benefits

It appears stuck on well-rehearsed objections and is just not understanding what the intervention of Judicial Review will have on the wider issues of infrastructure investment.

These directly affect job creation through new commercial investment and new residential development.

Or is it really the latter which the Alliance is fighting? That is where the Alliance misleads.

No investor will risk any critical new money until there is a clear view that the Link Road is to go ahead.

It is that part of the repeated Alliance objections which is the hardest to understand, especially when it is so obvious there is so little investment around.

Eastern Sussex is the poor relation by any other comparison when it comes to investment – and, admitting that it has spent 12 years at it and the county council has spent £15 million, the Alliance still wants to pull the plug. For what?

It is also an irony that the national railway network is to get a £4.2million extra investment with delivery by maybe 2020 plus. What is the Hastings to Tonbridge line benefit?

A massive lobby is needed now and much improved business case, before the line’s shortcomings of electrical supply, signalling and regular 12 car trains, are dealt with - all so needed to support a return to a reviving local economy.

The wonderful tongue in cheek suggestion raised the other week was to reinstate Mountfield Halt (increasing train journey times, stopping traffic on the local level crossings even longer - and which has absolutely no room for parking!) and to press for improvements to A21 corridor with more bus services - to and from where?

More bus services means more vehicles on the A21’s single carriageway section and would hardly provide a better travel experience for anyone.

That road is needed to boost confidence in the local economy, attract new investment - but by its actions as well as its words the Alliance will have none of it.

So we will have to wait and see the Review rejected. And suffer the further delay and cost.

Richard Tilden Smith

Church Cottages

Mountfield