Noticeably the plan also circumvents any dealings with the controversy surrounding the
proposed new runway at Stansted by not including its potential impact in the plan, basing
any air travel statistics on just the one existing runway despite the fact the second runway
would be in operation in 2012 some 9 years before the end of this plan. As an aside I
suspect anyway that the new runway will be built to take the new 555 seat Airbus which
currently can fly from only a handful of UK airports because the others are simply not
big enough... I believe it could currently only use Stansted in an emergency. If you build
a new machine you have got to have somewhere to try it out.
The prognosis for Essex is not good with over 123,000 new dwellings, possibly a
quarter of a million new inhabitants - where are all these people going to find work? I
hope I don't have to compete with them for a job in the next recession and what about
the next drought year ? Exactly how are these new inhabitants going to get to work? In
the example of Chelmsford, expected to take 14,000 new dwellings, I was not aware
that the 20,000 jobs needed by these people existed in Chelmsford. The A12 is, like the
railway, already running at capacity, so how are they going to get to London to work to
pay the mortgage on their new house? The Strategic Rail Authority is not being very
helpful either - it has recently refused to commit to a rail link between Chelmsford and
Stansted. One of the big rail problems as I understand it, is the bottleneck at Liverpool
Street which cannot process any more train arrivals than it currently does.
The Green Belt which has served Essex very well since its inception is also likely to be
a victim of EERA planning policy in south Essex (the now unitary authorities) and there
are proposals in the plan to relax the currently very stringent rules, but unfortunately
nothing is actually specified in the plan.
Personally I cannot believe that this plan is in any way workable. I hope that it is the
developers' usual trick of asking for 100 houses when really they want 50 and everyone
is happy with the 50 house outcome - the developers and politicians get what they want
and the electorate thinks it has got one over on the politicians.
The East of England is referred to in the plan as 'one of a group of North West European
regions'. It appears to me that Essex is slowly having its historic boundaries removed.
We have already lost the south west of our county to the London boroughs, more recently
we have had the Thurrock and Southend unitary authorities in the Thames Gateway. I
suspect that in a hundred years time our society will no longer be the Essex Field Club,
but will be the East of England (south section) Naturalists Field Club - assuming that
natural history recording has not been banned because it interferes with their aim of
trashing the landscape of a county we all know and love so much.
Incidentally if any of them at EERAread this article, Tendring (the old hundred currently
in N.E. Essex) is not spelt Tendering.
6
Essex Field Club Newsletter No. 47, May 2005