Meeting documents

Appx 8

Bath and North East Somerset Council

Executive Meeting - Wednesday 6^th September 2006

The Inspector's Report - The Local Plan - The Greenway Lane/Beechen Cliff School Lower Field recommendation

Statement from - Councillor Peter Metcalfe, Widcombe Ward

Ward Councillors supported by a vast amount of correspondence and representations received from residents welcome very much the view put forward by officers that the Inspector's recommendation for the Beechen Cliff School Lower Field site to be made available for housing development should not be adopted by Council.

Clearly the Inspector has seriously misunderstood the increasing levels of traffic using the lane. Between 8-9am and now in the evening it is normal for around 600 vehicles to use a lane that in part has no pavement, narrow pinch points, plus some front doors opening straight onto the highway and students walking and cycling to Beechen Cliff school negotiating their way around traffic levels that the lane was never designed to accept. It is frankly unsustainable.

The Greenway Lane Area Residents' Forum has to be congratulated on undertaking voluntarily and on occasion in partnership with the Council a series of traffic count and monitoring surveys that over the past 18 months has provided the evidence to support the officer's opinion ` that the highway impacts are more damaging than the Inspector considered in her report'.

It is also of deep concern to local people that the Lane's character would be seriously compromised if a development of 18 houses would be allowed on a site that is used across all age groups for informal recreation. The green lunges is one of the unique characteristics this World Heritage Site, an aspect that is now coincidentally recognised by the government's renewed interest in the need for green open spaces in urban areas.

Greenway Lane and the School Lower Field are in a conservation area and as the officer's report states `the impact of the development on a distinctive semi-rural character of this historic lane, not least the character of that part of the Conservation Area, was highlighted at the Local Plan Inquiry, it appears the inspector underplayed this aspect of the case in her reasoning'. Ward Councillors and a clear majority of residents cannot but agree.

I ask the Executive to uphold the officers' report and reject the re-allocation of this land.