LETTER: Fight the area's corner please

Once again my heart sank. This headline should not even need to be written and wouldn’t have been if we had anyone fighting this area’s corner, if we had councils that we knew were on our side.

Where are the people with guts and an iron will who will save us from the onslaught of these developers? What is the mentality of someone who stands for election at whatever level and then lets the ‘power buzz’ take over and thus lose sight of the fact that they would not be where they are without us, and actually we do not like what they are doing?

The Whitehouse ‘project’ was thrown out twice and accepted on third appeal. Why? Because someone who should have been at the meeting was away and left a letter to be read explaining their feelings, thinking that would suffice to win the third appeal. Wrong call.

Everyone knows that a third party presentation of an argument does not carry the same weight and it looks as if the person does not really care. Shameful.

The constructors will put in a country park. What? They are going to be desecrating swathes of countryside and they think a ‘country park’ will make everything alright?

How can the various councils still have the trust of the Cicestrians whose backs they are supposed to have? How can we have confidence in them to do their best for this area? Who is going to be the first to stand up, bang down a fist and say, firmly, ‘NO’.

All councils are temporary, we are all temporary. We are custodians for the short time we are here. It is our duty to care for our land and to create a legacy/heritage for future generations.

Housing estates and motorways do not generate employment (once built). Constructors should be banned completely from touching green belt or farm land until every city centre has been renovated, until every brownfield site has been developed. They would be applauded for their ethical schemes instead of hated for their desecration of the countryside.

We do not know what is going to happen after 2019 so we should hold fire on all building projects until we know if we really ‘need’ the extra housing in this area. The fact that we don’t have the infrastructure to absorb thousands of extra people goes without saying, but seems to escape the councils’ notice. There will be a small number of so-called affordable houses in any new development, but ‘affordable’ for who, on what salary? It is, in fact, even questionable that we ‘need’ all these houses as (correct me if I’m wrong) 50 per cent of the new people in Fishbourne are not from the area. Why, therefore do we need:want literally hundreds more houses?

What can be done? Could our MP please step in and say that enough is enough? The hypocrisy of central government is shocking as the PM speaks about preserving the countryside and then expects places like Chichester to be turned into massive housing estates.