Due process means Road must go ahead

In response to Barry M Jones, it is diverting to note that he has finally lost all sensibility. He is into the half truth campaign hectoring. What a laugh! There is little point in responding to the accusations that anyone wantonly would aim to cover all the countryside with asphalt and to introduce “improved infrastructure to Mountfield” without reasoned cause. Where is that? He has missed just about every other point previously made.

Analysis shows that nowhere has there been any newly published highway scheme in East Sussex to cover “thousands of prime acres”, nor does Mountfield development appear in the national railway’s outline Control Periods CP5 or CP6 funding allocations over the next 10 years. Where is the sanity in supporting the Jones view - exemplified by head burying in the rurality of Bickley Lane? The sad reality is that East Sussex is a low-level investment County and everyone in the County suffers for it. Until that is reversed - and we all agree together that it should be - we will continue to be an unattractive investment area.

Despite the assertions to the contrary, the majority of infrastructure developments put forward are on a rationalised basis of need within very tight cost constraints. So if there is a cheaper choice we get the worst. The two biggest influences in the process are in the democratically elected political management and the competition for funding. Traffic jams that impede on the A259 and the A21, due to these roads’ inability to cope with the volumes of traffic and which cause varying degrees of personal inconvenience and national cost, have to be resolved. Time to rehearse the argument for improvements all over again? I think not. The very fact of the scandalous loss of £20billion squandered each year due to the effects of wasted time, energy burned off unnecessarily, in the crucial roads arteries, surely confirms the need to respond and do something about it. That is under political management.

The A259 build issue is now quite simply one of upholding the democratic process and our national rule of law, as well as having confidence that our economic management overall works to our benefit. While the latter is much influenced by the reality of political differences, the former provide the basis of the whole of our present system of government - whether we like it or not, or indeed as so many continue to hold such a complacent attitude towards it. Once into contract, the road construction must proceed without the aggravation, hindrance and cost (which will doubtless run into millions now on the Link Road works) being incurred to secure the site.

Richard Tilden Smith

Church Cottages, Mountfield