The planning application has been submitted for 500 homes between Bunsen Wood and the Keresley Rugby Club (also known as Thompsons Road / Thompsons Farm development). If you have concerns about this development, and how it will affect the local area when considered alongside all the other developments, now is the time to raise your objection.
Please
submit your comments on the website or write a short email opposing the development and send it by midnight on 17 April to
planning@coventry.gov.uk. You need to give this reference: OUT/2019/0484 (if you miss the deadline your comments are still considered so it’s still worth doing).
To help you, here are some points you may want to consider (use your own words when you submit it if possible):
1. The development will destroy an important remnant of the
Ancient Arden Landscape. The area is “especially significant” as “the only remaining area of ancient countryside in Warwickshire.” [quote from the 1995 Coventry Arden policy]. The homes will blight the view from the roman hill fort at Corley Rocks, a scheduled Ancient Monument.
2. Building on former greenbelt is not necessary. 8 years into the local plan period, there
no sign of the promised population boom. A review of the latest Office of National Statistics data and research – which has been provided to the city council by Keep Our Green Belt Green, – shows no sign of a spike in a wide range of indicators, including: Gas and Electric consumption, electoral roll, births, school admissions, car registrations, jobs growth, house prices, house building, state pensions and ESA benefits claimed, and domestic waste tipped into bins. If people are pouring into Coventry, they are ghosts or vampires who leave no trace. (let us know if you want to see the statistics –
info@coventrygreenbelt.org).
3. The development will
reduce biodiversity. 13 or 19 specialist farmland birds, including skylarks, barn owl, and lapwing, live and breed in the area. Such birds have suffered catastrophic losses – down 70% in the last 40 years, according to Natural England. These birds will all be gone once the houses are built. Badgers, a protected species live adjacent and will not tolerate living next to thousands of people and cats and dogs. They will go.
4. Local roads
cannot take the traffic from 3,100 new homes in the Keresley area. Bennetts road and the Radford Road are already badly congested in the mornings. North Warks council has objected that the small country roads nearby will be used as rat runs and are entirely unsuitable. The draft Air quality plan, which will close off the Holyhead road and Coundon road, will force more traffic, coming from the A45, into the Keresley Road Radford Road corridor, which will combine with traffic from this development.
5. Taken as a whole, with all the 42,400 homes planned in or near Coventry, there will be a
highly adverse effect on air pollution. Already Coventry is one of the 30 worst cities in the country for air quality and it has the worst polluted road in the West Midlands. Air pollution needs to be considered “cumulatively,” (in the words of the EU Air Quality Directive) not piecemeal. Far more people die from air pollution in Coventry than from road traffic fatalities.
6. The
local health facilities can’t cope. UHCW has objected that they don’t have the capacity to accommodate 3,000 more houses, let alone 42,400 envisaged for the whole Coventry area. No one has consulted the ambulance service, the GP service (the CCG) or the mental health service. Local GP surgeries are bursting.
7. There is
no assurance that schools and GP surgeries will be built in time, if ever. At Banner Lane, 10 years ago, a surgery and a primary school were promised but they are still not built.
8. The
ancient woodlands will suffer from excess trampling and pet excreta. The additional fertilisation from pet poo, will encourage nettles and brambles and choke out ancient woodland plants such as wood anemone, wood sorrel, the yellow archangel, opposite leaved saxifrage -all found in the local woods.
If you are at all concerned about the amount of development around Coventry we all need for you to voice those concerns to the council. The planning committee need to know just how many of us do not agree with their plans. Once the development is done it cannot be reversed and the damage is done.
