We always welcome a Letter to the Editor to share with our readers – unsurprisingly they don’t always reflect the views of this publication. If you have something you’d like to share, get in touch and of course, your considered comments are welcome below.
This from Peter Lloyd of East Cowes. Ed
The proposed number of housing at Crossways has increased in a few weeks from 154 at the public consultation, to a possible 165 for outline planning permission.
Why does this administration seem to have a gung-ho, cavalier attitude when it comes to so called regeneration consisting of housing and yet more housing? I know that the council’s income is tight, but all this administration can see are the £ signs, from the selling of assets such as the land to build houses, Section 106 monies paid by the builder and council tax income.
No long-term employment
They will also tell you that the development will create employment. Yes, at the construction stage, but no long-term employment helping the town’s economy.
This has been proved with the unfinished Hawthorne Meadows development and other completed ones.
If you add up the housing developments that have been completed within East Cowes, plus the proposed developments including Crossways, Albany Road, Maresfield Road, the Phoenix and Trinity House marshalling yards and the possible Springhill / Norris Castle estate, then without exaggeration the number of new houses built in East Cowes since the start of the regeneration programme, would be the more than the turned down 2,000 homes of the proposed new village at Wellow.
Doubled in size and unable to cope
East Cowes has had more than its fair share; it has doubled in size and unable to cope with the numbers of people wishing to move here.
The decision makers will not be affected by their decisions, but the people of East Cowes and Whippingham will be for ever more.
They need to understand the implications of this scheme and how their decision will affect the local area and the Island as a whole.
At full capacity
Local schools, doctors, dentist and drainage are at full capacity now.
It will also increase the pressure on the Island road network and the Island’s Social Services.
Isolating residents
The building of housing pockets, such as Crossways, helps to destroy the local community by forming an isolated pocket of residents within the town’s community having an adverse impact on the town.
This outskirt of town housing will be of very little benefit to the East Cowes town centre and its vibrancy. They will most probably head into Newport.
IW Council need to withdraw this application
The IW Council need to listen to, and represent the residents by withdrawing this planning application, as the majority of local residents are opposed to it.
They are going against their own planning department’s Island Plan by building on a Greenfield site that is the last open field preventing the mergence of the settlements of East Cowes and Whippingham.
Building on this open space would destroy the ecology and environment that the site is now giving.
