The Public Meeting

This has been an important week in the consultation process with the public meeting and its associated publicity opportunities. There have been several key discoveries and  I will try to relate them in the following post.


Firstly the council came out with their arguments in favour of development next to the mere, these being the proximity of the site to the centre of town, as they put it, the good access to the site and they also set great stock by the "opportunity this affords to extend the cemetery". 


Franky it was difficult to approach the last point without seeming rude during the public meeting, to accept a 5m strip of land to extend the cemetery in return for building 22 houses is utterly derisory and I cannot criticise it strongly enough. This point certainly drew plenty of opposition last night from the 200 residents of Ellesmere who turned out to the public meeting and to be honest it highlights that this proposal is the result of some very questionable logic and merits investigation by someone. 


If the cemetery cannot be extended into this field then so be it, we obviously cannot force the purchase, its been tried and didn't work, but the fact that it cannot be used for the cemetery does not automatically mean it should be built on. We should simply look elsewhere for a suitable site and leave this field be, in fact there is a discussion to be had as to whether the field should be incorporated into the conservation area to put its development beyond doubt.

For this site to emerge as a front runner from 14 proposals in Ellesmere beggars belief, especially since the town council came out strongly in opposition to this part of the plan. This certainly makes a mockery of the statement by Mal Price, the head of planning for Shropshire,  in this article in the Shropshire Star where he states that “All the sites and all the figures being put forward, have been generated by the local communities”. No they havent, in this case it was put forward by the owner, a County Councillor from Berrington, sorry, it may be inconvenient but its a fact.

Back to the debate, I think the statement that this site has good access could use a few pretty pictures to illustrate the opposing point of view. This is the only route out of the increasing built up Swan Hill area, its a single carriageway road and as you can see whichever way you are going you generally have to wait for the oncoming traffic to pass. According to the Ellesmere place plan - "Employment self containment in Ellesmere is comparatively low, at 36.1%, although this is typical for a town of its size.  There are fewer jobs in the town, at 1,167, than there are resident workers."

Anyone moving to this site would not be working in town, they will be commuting to Wrexham, Oswestry or Shrewsbury and therefore will simply add to the congestion at this point. This next picture is the access from the field itself, again single carriageway and this time obscured by the cemetery, we may not be able to extend it but we still cannot move it. 


I simply cannot understand why a professional planning officer would stand in front of 200 people and argue that this site has good access. Dont forget this is not simply saying the site has good access as an aside but using the good access as a reason to put the site forward before 11 other sites in Ellesmere. I hate to think what the access was like in the other proposed sites!


Moving on to another important point and that is a quick review of the consultation process, the lack of publicity for this is well trodden ground, the lack of an offline option for resident to lodge an opinion has also been covered in previous posts and we, as residents, have had to step in and gather 83 written objections which were presented yesterday at the meeting. What is really important however is how the consultation moves on from here, if the Council are to retain any semblance of this exercise being a consultation this proposal must be dropped, its that simple. Here are a few points:

• 200 Ellesmere residents attended the meeting last night and 100% voiced their opposition to this plan during a show of hands
• Ellesmere's own town councillors came out in opposition to the plan
• The Chair of the meeting, Ann Hartley, Deputy Leader of Shropshire County Council, brought a halt to the proceedings because in her own words (roughly) "I can see this plan is not going to be put forward". If my quote is inaccurate it certainly captures the thrust of the statement and it should be appearing in the Shropshire Star verbatim next week.

There is another point which we need to be clear on, during a radio interview linked here (2 hours 17 minutes in) there was just a hint that the missing 3,300 Ellesmere residents from last nights meeting might somehow be in favour of this development. When you extrapolate something you extend the trend to encompass the missing data, 100% opposed implies 100% opposed when extrapolated. It does illustrate a fair point however, there is simply no substitute for everyone filling out the questionnaire although apparently its perfectly acceptable to skip the boring bits, I wish I had known that!

Before you do however, that is if you still haven't done it, there are a couple of other small points which were brought out during the discussion yesterday. It turns out the following field which sits opposite the petrol station has somehow found itself inside the development boundary! This came out in a sort of "how did that get in there" moment. The rest of us have been so blinkered by the Swan Hill development that this snuck in right under the radar and needs just as much opposition as the former development. Just because there has not been an application for development it does not for a second mean that one will not be forthcoming if it finds itself within a new development boundary. 

Also it was well worth studying the proposal for the extension of the quarry, although this development is in a less sensitive area it does butt up quite closely to the canal side and this is another area where the Council need to put in safeguards to ensure it does not encroach on the public spaces.

I think that about covers the main points raised during the last few days, of course there were many more very interesting issues concerning infrastructure, drainage and the scale of the proposals but I will like to invite anyone with a more complete understanding of these issues to add their comments rather than try to cover them myself.

Finally there are a couple of links to the radio interviews which were aired on the 3rd and 4th May

Before the meeting http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/console/p00qx6kx scan to 2 hours 19 minutes

After the meeting http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/console/p00qy000 scan to 2 hours 17 minutes