Ticking the box

Given an allocation by Arun District Council to provide for 100 houses over the next 16 years, the neighbourhood plan group has spent two years engaging with the community to find the most suitable sites for these extra dwellings to be built. Key preferences clearly and unanimously emerged – small developments (no more than six houses) on brownfield sites, certainly not on prime agricultural land, and within the village boundary in order to preserve our pleasant, rural village identity.

Then the bombshell hit, in the shape of ‘St Mary’s Park’, a proposed development of 250 houses on two green fields of prime grade 2 agricultural land, at present full of ripening, waving, golden corn, and outside the village boundary, which would not only swallow up the village identity mentioned above, but also swamp the roads, school, doctors’ surgeries, wildlife, countryside environment and ancient hedgerows.

Clearly the architects of this disastrous plan have paid no heed whatsoever to the opinions of the people of Yapton, as expressed in the emerging neighbourhood plan although, unbelievably, in its brochure, Strutt and Parker states that the development ‘would meet the key objectives in the emerging Yapton neighbourhood plan’.

Indeed, the proposed St Mary’s Park disaster does not comply with any of the objectives of the Yapton neighbourhood plan – precisely the opposite in every respect. In line with the modern trend for ‘transparency’, maybe Strutt and Parker should retract its incorrect and misleading statements and replace them with what is obviously its real intent – “We can tick the box that we have consulted with the community but as we don’t give two hoots what they think, we will bulldoze our plan through anyway.” Well, chaps, you will find to your cost that the people of Yapton think differently.

Tricia Wales

North End Road

Yapton