The local people kicking up a storm against billion-pound developments.
A selection of comments from the article”
““One reason we are seeing more campaigns such as mine is that you don’t have the public interest being served by councils or government; instead, they act as an arbitrator between communities and business. The people whose job it is to work in the public interest don’t see that as their job anymore”
Turner says many developers are successfully lobbying government to tie the hands of campaigners like him – hence the measures in the housing bill.”
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“To understand what was going on with the scheme I had to visit the council offices,” explains McHattie. “I couldn’t see the plans online. When I turned up I was put in a room and shown the plans, which were dragged up from a box in the archives. I was told I could not take photographs but I have no architecture expertise so I didn’t understand what I was looking at. How could people of the city understand what was going on if they all had to visit this room to get information?”
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“It’s in a developer’s interest to make the documents as difficult to comprehend as possible,” says Donoghue, who adds that it is “ridiculous” that the Goodsyard documents have more pages than the complete works of Shakespeare or the bible.”
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“Groups like ours do not oppose development per se,” says Hammerson, a local researcher and author. “We oppose bad development, and unfortunately we get too much of that.”
He says more developers now use the planning system as a “second throw of the dice” to overrule refusals made under local policies.”
East Devon Watch 