Debate is about the future (From Basingstoke Gazette)

Debate is about the future

3:25pm Monday 3rd December 2007 in Letters

Sir.-It is a great shame that some Conservatives hide behind council meetings held in secret and then seek to twist the facts to suit their version of events.

Councillor Ruffell's accusations on last week's Gazette letters page are, in my opinion, untrue and deliberately misleading.

We could quote Tory after Tory opposed to flats and say they are being hypocritical by proposing the very things they've fought so vigorously against, but that can't become what this debate is about.

We should be debating how we shape future developments to deliver what Basingstoke needs. We believe you can shape development in the public interest. The Tories have argued it should be left to the market to decide what is built where.

If the Tories ram the Gresley Road decision through the council, we know that developers will challenge the council on other bigger sites. The council's integrity as a planning authority is on the line.

The Tories don't realise that they will be opening the door to thousands of flats throughout Basingstoke. It will be a cramming free-for-all because they have not followed their own rules.

We have always believed Gresley Road is not suitable for residential development. No amount of twisting of words can change that truth.

We should be solving the real housing needs of hundreds of families currently living in unsuitable and temporary accommodation because we haven't got the family homes they need. There are 116 homeless families in Basingstoke town needing a house.

We need to recapture the sense of building for people, not for profit.

-Cllr Laura James, Cllr George Hood and Cllr Paul Harvey,
Norden councillors.

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Sir.-It's bad enough that Cllr Ruffell and his fellow Tories excluded the public and press from council meetings to discuss their plan to turn this isolated site into yet another high-rise development. However, in last week's Gazette he attempts to rewrite history to suggest this has been "planned" for years.

When the sale of this site was first proposed in 2003, it was on the basis of "alternative" uses to provide employment, in this case retail development. At no time did the council consider it suitable for residential use.

As for the discussions between the Berkeley Group and council officers, had the public and press not been excluded they could have heard the facts and made their own minds up.

The reality is that what they are supporting is development at a far higher density than Victory Hill combined with offices, shops and a hotel on an even smaller area of land.

As far back as 2005, the council had accepted that town centre demand for flats had been met. Yet the current Tory administration, having clearly failed to learn the lessons of the 1960s, is now embarking on a major expansion of inappropriate flat building that builds in chronic overcrowding.

Basingstoke needs family homes in real communities, not isolated estates with transient populations that will become the high-rise slums of the future.

- Councillor Ian Tilbury,
Independent,
Overton.