A rant indeed !.I suspect the sole reason Cllr. Harmer mentioned that he is a Councillor is because there's a fairly strong possibility that the application may be referred to the local area committee (which he sits on) for comment. If he didn't say he was a Councillor and you didn't know he was, and then went along to the committee and found out he was a Councillor, you'd be ranting about how he hadn't said he was a Councillor when posting on here ! - if there's one thing I learnt when I was a Council Officer it was that no matter how much you try to do the right thing, someone will always criticise !.I think the affordable homes 'argument' has been adequately covered in the national media - there can be no doubt that there has been a massive under-provision of affordable housing, and the old 50% split required by policy between market and affordable housing never materialised in reality.Regarding the comments about GWQ, I haven't been there myself but I live in a development where around 20% of the units are non-market housing. 95% of the time I've lived here (9.5 years now) there's been no issues or differences between the market housing occupiers and the non-market occupiers. I hear stories that inside it is rather grotty due to lack of care by the residents etc, but externally no-one visiting here would know the difference - given I face the non-market block I wouldn't still be here if there were problems. I'll openly admit to an extent I sometimes look down my nose at some of the non-market occupiers, like the woman who seemingly never goes out and spends most of the day stood on her balcony with a fag in one hand and a phone in the other, but as a generalisation I think the perception of 'affordable housing' is far removed from reality.I drive, I cycle, I walk, I run, I use public transport. I drive to work every day because I'm regularly having to visit sites and clients anywhere in the South East. However, I've reached the stage where I'm now going to run either to or from work (and get the bus for the other leg of the journey) because it's got to the stage where it takes me 40-50 minutes most mornings to drive under 6 miles and I'd rather use that time to keep in shape and mentally happy then getting stressed. We have to get away from our love of our cars. We shouldn't expect parking space on our streets as a right. God knows how you'd enforce it, but I'd ban any able bodied parent or child living with 2 miles of a school from using a private car to travel to/from school, and the same for any employees living with 2 miles of their place of work. That's me ranting, but it infuriates me that there's such a culture in this country where Mummy drives one child a mile to school in their BMW/Audi/Merc/4x4.Back to the planning point, as I keep stressing, national planning policy is very much driven towards minimum parking provision, not maximum.
Adam Beamish ● 4942d