National politicians 'disowning the issue' of overdevelopment around Chichester

Our purpose was to present a petition with over 5,000 signatures to Michael Gove, Minister for Housing, asking for dialogue. We wanted support from the top to stop the rampant urbanisation of the Manhood Peninsula and the neighbouring coastal villages.

We welcome new housebuilding, as long as it’s in the right place with the right infrastructure. But in this area, Southern Water cannot dispose of our sewage; the traffic problems are notorious; there are no new jobs to go with any new houses; and we are in a flood plain which the Interparliamentary Panel on Climate Change (a United Nations body) predicts will be turned from land to sea within our grandchildren’s lifetimes.

We invited Gove to our march, along with Gillian Keegan, our local MP. Keegan said she was busy doing other things. Gove never replied.

The politicians may not have been interested, but the march was covered extensively, and sympathetically, by the Chichester Observer, local radio, BBC Television, The Times and The Guardian.

After the march, we physically presented our petition to Gove’s office in Westminster, with a copy to Keegan. No reply. We then wrote to Keegan asking for her help in arranging a meeting with Gove’s office. No reply. We wrote again, and went to her office. Eventually, she wrote to us to say that she had written to Gove, though we never saw her letter to him and she has never indicated any sympathy for our cause.

Meanwhile, Gove wrote to us in May – to say he was sorry for not replying to our invitation to the march we sent to him five months ago. And an MP in his office, Stuart Andrew, wrote to us in late April, effectively disowning the issue and telling us to talk to the council. But one of the main drivers of the petition in the first place is that our council - who are largely sympathetic to our cause – are hamstrung by government demands that 100 per cent of their housing quota must be delivered, even though over 70 per cent of the land cannot be used as it is in the national park.

In short, the government sets a rule making a demand on the council which they can’t meet, and when we ask to talk to government about this, they send us back to the council. Catch 22.

We like to think that living in a democracy means something. Yet a petition with over 5,000 signatures (that’s about a third of the adult population of the area in question) has been roundly ignored. We like to think that local MPs have a responsibility to understand local issues. Yet our local MP has had no dialogue or direct contact with us at all.

It may be that in a safe Tory seat (Chichester had a Conservative majority of more than 21,000 at the last general election) our ambitious MP is happier to find time for TV interviews than to talk to her constituents. But Gove and Keegan are public servants: we don’t work for them, they are supposed to be working for us.

Isn’t it time they started to do that?

The online petition has 5,390 signatures. Visit https://you.38degrees.org.uk/petitions/stop-the-urbanisation-of-the-manhood-peninsula