WHEN the Government announces details of its plans to free up planning controls in a few weeks the fine print will be scrutinised by all those concerned with the outline planning application to build about 1,000 homes in the Gomm Valley, between Cock Lane and Hammersley Lane.
The application is hugely controversial, not least because a Government planning inspector said before the application was made that about 450 houses would be adequate for the site.
A new council committee, called the Strategic Sites Committee, will consider the application in a few months after the Government’s looser planning laws are known. It could be very significant. The new committee has a brief to look at major developments over the whole of Buckinghamshire and the power to direct where those developments can go. If the Government’s new laws give them more flexibility they could decide that 1,000 homes in an greenfield site cleared for 450 is over the top.
Meanwhile, the Pimms Action Group – residents who live in the Pimms Road area off Cock Lane – have written to Tylers Green councillors saying the proposed scheme will have “serious consequences for the inhabitants of Penn and Tylers Green” and wondering why people here “are waving flags for the developers, Human Nature?”
The Penn and Tylers Green Residents’ Society and the local parish council, Chepping Wycombe, support the plan (see last blog), but scores of individuals and organisations in the village have written in protest.
And there are signs the parish council is beginning to wobble in its support. The council’s planning committee meeting last month said the “huge increase” in the number of proposed homes from the original figures discussed would have a negative impact on the volume of traffic in the area.
The parish councillors called for a new independent traffic survey to be undertaken and also expressed concern about increased pollution, the apparent under-capacity of the sewage and drainage systems and worries that the spine road through the development would be used as a rat run taking additional vehicles through Tylers Green.