Doric’s Deeply Unfortunate Scheme (letter)

I had a letter from a resident this week that I thought provided such an excellent precis of this Doric/Mace/ToryVale/WestWay situation, that I asked them if I could publish their letter here. They said yes, but declined attribution.

Dear Cllr Hallett

I moved to Elm’s Rise with my partner three years ago. It’s a lovely place to live. I’ve found the politics of the place and the Council’s apparent priorities to be, shall we say, rather surprising after living in {snip}. Your communications have been tremendously helpful to my awareness of the issues we face living here.

Sadly, but inevitably, I will now rant on about Doric for a little bit!

Thanks for the update about the revisions to the West Way centre application, for posting Mace’s patronising and self-important response to a constituent on your blog and for the work you are putting in to try and get some sense around this deeply unfortunate scheme. I’ve found the behaviour of the developers absolutely jaw-dropping in its unprofessionalism and contempt for both the local community and sensible planning. Sadly I’ve found it impossible to work out whether the failings of this scheme are due to negligence on the part of the DC or the hubris of inexperienced developers. A good measure of both I suspect.

Looking briefly at some of the documentation in the revised plans a couple of things struck me. In their EA they discounted the refurbishment of the existing centre because a large supermarket would impact the current centre. Now they provide a Southampton University/Tesco report that supports large supermarkets as beneficial to current centres, I think to justify their traffic projections, but ironically evidence for exploring the popular option that they discounted in their EA.

Then they state in the response to the Design Review that the quantum of uses is necessary because of the complexity and scale of the project, thus implicitly refuting objections to scale or evidence of need; a complexity and scale which by all accounts has been pushed only by themselves.

And they’ve provided the planning ruling on the massive out of town development at Rushden Lakes. So I guess in some way at least they acknowledge what this has never been about the redevelopment of a local centre.

So frustrating.