UKIP North East
NO to the County Durham Plan
Having taken a long hard look at Labour’s County Durham Plan, UKIP County Durham can come to just one conclusion, that it is a sell out of the environment, the County and the City, with just one aim, to increase the council’s income and power.
The plan to build homes and more importantly bypasses through some of the already reduced green belt around the City of Durham is an act of wanton destruction by a party that has proven itself to have no understanding of the countryside or the rural environment. This may only involve a small percentage of the County’s green belt, but continual encroachment soon adds up. Besides which, it is a well-known consequence of bypass roads, that they increase traffic and lead to infill.
The plans to develop the City of Durham are a nightmare. Durham is a tourist attraction that has World Heritage Site status, so what do the council plan to do? They plan to put a ‘site suitable for a major national headquarters’ on a hill overlooking the Cathedral! No mention of any major national company being interested, but it will need a new council head office and a new police headquarters, probably on a green field site and at great cost to us the taxpayers at a time of austerity. They also plan to build an extra 5000 homes on the greenbelt, with no mention of the infrastructure needed to support these developments, such as Schools and Health Care or the increasing urban sprawl that Durham is becoming.
As for the plans for the rest of the County; Bishop Auckland is already redeveloping a vibrant new town center and Barnard Castle residents need to be fully consulted on which direction development of this quaint market town takes. Spennymoor is in dire need of a town center worth the name, but all of this is a waste of time if the local population do not have the jobs to pay for them to go into town. The County Durham Plan does nothing to address this most important of issues. What we need are industrial jobs and the training to give local people a chance of getting those jobs. What we do not need is to destroy the character of the local environment and of the City.
