Readers' letters

Far from harming the city, encroachment on the green belt will harm the surrounding villages.

It's good that business is booming but this surely means that people outside the normal catchment area for employment around York will want to take advantage of all the opportunities of quality jobs on offer, and move into the area. York only needs to look at the South East to see that the workforce is very mobile.

I have lived in Dunnington 33 years, and have seen it grow from a large village to almost a small town, because it is close to York, and to a good main road network. Although Dunnington is administered by City of York Council, I do not regard myself as a "Yorkie", there are "townies" and countrymen, and I have always been a countryman.

Finally if Richard Branson establishes his high speed train link from York to London, what's the betting that people from that area will decide to live around York and work in London?

R Osborne,

Springbank Avenue,

Dunnington, York.

...It is incorrect to suggest that the Draft Local Plan does not adequately protect Green Belt land ('Green For Gone', March 20).

Questions relating to the preservation of the Green Belt were dealt with satisfactorily under the first draft plan.

Those familiar with the Local Plan under its various metamorphoses will have been struck by its flexibility.

The plan as it stands could be used to frustrate the schemes of developers just as it has been used to frustrate the wishes of residents. If the chairman of the planning committee warns us that the Green Belt is vulnerable, it must be assumed that plans for its dismemberment are well advanced.

Doubtless, as a former chairman of planning famously wrote, there's only a public consultation "to go through".

Housing is an emotive issue. Developers happily pose as public benefactors, but it will be noted that when there was money to be made from swallowing great tracts of land for supermarkets or industrial estates there was no talk then of the paramount needs of the homeless.

The fault lies in our present planning laws which so grossly favour developers. Residents should have precisely the same rights of appeal against developments as developers have against refusal. Land use is a national issue.

The only true solution is a democratic one. In the interim, our elected representatives should not weakly capitulate simply because developers are busier and endowed with more persuasive means than the rest of us.

William Dixon Smith,

Welland Rise,

Acomb,

York.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.