It seems our Rushcliffe Borough Council (RBC) councillor, you know, the one who is charged with representing the parishioners of Tollerton, has developed an unwelcome trait: failing to respond to emails and ignoring the concerns of her parishioners.
In the pub the other night I heard the words and phrases ‘incompetent’, ‘out of her depth’, ‘waste of space and money’, and ‘doesn’t work for the parish or the parishioners anyway’.
One long-standing bone of contention is the councillor promised funding to a worthwhile youth organisation in the village and then, a couple of weeks later, not even responding to emails requesting the promised funding. The youth organisation closed a year later.
However, that councillor attended the recent RBC ‘consultation’ with regard to the proposed development of 4,400 dwellings on the former RAF Tollerton (contaminated land).
In response to questions from a parishioner, the councillor has offered these choice thoughts:
‘The development will happen. The site makes sense, it’s not in a rural area and it’s a strategic location’. (If the parish of Tollerton is not a rural area, I honestly have no clue what it is! Perhaps it’s an underground zoo?)
‘The SPD does include road infrastructure detail’. (Well yes it does include infrastructure detail, but it’s horribly wrong. The SPD puts roads through people’s gardens, it puts junctions where no junctions can possibly exist and – best of all – it provides no costs for any of this work. That’s not really the kind of detail the councillor should be praising, is it?)
‘If RBC doesn’t accept this proposal, once Rushcliffe is part of Nottingham City, they’ll impose greater housing on the people of Rushcliffe’. (This stunning sentence is two mean threats in one. The threat that Rushcliffe will be absorbed into Nottingham City [which is far from being a certainty!], and the threat that Nottingham City will dump its demand and new housing developments in Rushcliffe [actually, there are rules to prevent this, I do know how unitary authorities work!]. Both of these mealy-mouthed threats are beyond unlikely. It’s just a bundle of scare stories designed to make the people of Tollerton compliant)
‘The developer has their own contamination experts doing surveys which they are carrying out by putting rods into the ground at various locations to take readings’. (Well this is highly illegal. We know the developer has not applied to the Environment Agency for permission to dig holes or carry out any sub-surface survey of a radiologically-contaminated site. Perhaps the councillor is horribly mistaken? Or misinformed? Or – what’s the new political word – perhaps she misspoke?)
‘Many housing sites are located on areas with Radon where housing is common’. (Yes, we’re aware of this. Radon, you see, is a naturally occurring gas in certain areas of the UK – Cornwall and Edinburgh for example. However the number of houses built on known contaminations of Radium [which has a radioactive half-life of around 1,600 years] is currently zero because nobody is mad enough to even try this)
‘The airport had to close because it was not viable’. (Ah, but we looked into this untruth. The last five years accounts of both Nottingham City Airport Ltd and Truman Aviation Ltd lodged at Companies House disprove that horrible misinformation. I wonder where the councillor could have got that lie from?)
‘She would rather see houses built on the airport than built nearer to Tollerton’. (The councillor here, clearly demonstrating a lack of understanding that the development will grow and will creep because the green buffer is a figment of imagination of everyone except the developer and, by the way, the number of houses plotted for the airfield has already increased to 4,400)
On the basis of all of these things, it would seem our RBC councillor could do with some education? Or maybe she just needs to be replaced and put out to grass?
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