‘Free market’ woes

FORTY years ago I helped found the East Preston Preservation Society, with the purpose of of opposing the dissolution of what was then a “Garden Village” – not the rebuilding of main roads with multi-storey flats and tower houses in car parks.
By The Newsroom
Published 12th Sep 2011, 11:08 BST

Since then, successive governments have been impotent in protecting even the borders of this country. The result being overpopulation, that has created a whirlpool of property inflation, only now ended temporarily by predictable crash.

The situation is made worse at the point property is sold, when a so-called “free market” causes those who enjoyed house and garden, to give way to pure avarice.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

Land prices demanded by private and local authority owners are ludicrous. Developers then come in with only one motive which is maximum profit.

Planning authorities are faced with site plans that they did not instigate, which they have to give reason to disapprove.

There is no adequate control in what is done to existing properties, with results that cause trouble for all future owners.

We now have sites rebuilt to maximum density, as car parks with houses or flats, small houses with substandard rooms, on three floors, and fewer people who can afford even that.

R. W. Standing,

Sea Road,

East Preston

‘Point missed’