A correspondent writes:

A report in this week’s View From Colyton reveals that while EDDC Leader Paul Diviani and their local district councillor Helen Parr claim proudly that places like are Colyton are secure from development beyond Built Up Area Boundaries because the Local Plan is nearly there, that is not what the Planning Inspector thinks.

“I can give no weight to the fact that the appeal site is outside the built-up area boundary, as the housing policies of the adopted Local Plan (including such boundaries) must, in the absence of a five-year supply of housing land, be considered out of date,” he states.

Doubtless encouraged by this, another developer just up the road has just announced an appeal to th e Inspector for 16 homes next to the Playing Fields APP/U1105/W/15/3137990. The Parish Council, somewhat muddily greased the wheels for this site by including it as developable in the last Strategic Housing Assessment process, and although they officially oppose the development for public consumption, at Monday’s Parish Council meeting they chose to do nothing at all to object further to the Inspector.

Meanwhile, the vast elephant in the room in Colyton, the huge disused Ceramtec site, seems to be of little interest to the Parish Council’s leading lights. Which is just as well for the landowners and holders of key strategic tenancies amongst them, and their associates, because the brownfield site has the obvious potential to meet the parish of Colyton’s housing land need for a generation. These same people are doggedly gripping the controls of Colyton’s tardy Neighbourhood Plan process.

Ring out the old, ring in the new, but when it comes to transparency there can be few places in Britain as deliberately opaque as Colyton Parish Council.