WELCOME TO FELSTED

Please see the important message below from the Neighbourhood Plan Steering Group about forthcoming presentations on the 13th (7pm) or 14th April (10am) at the Memorial Hall.

Over the last three years your Neighbourhood Plan Steering Group has been working hard to produce a genuinely ambitious Neighbourhood Plan that delivered everything you have asked for during our consultations.  For many months now most of our policies have been completed and we have been ready to bring the plan forward to a pre-referendum consultation.  As we hope you know, pivotal to our ambitions has been our efforts to deliver a Community Hub that would alleviate the congestion in the centre of the village and ensure access to amenities – like the doctors and the village shop – for the next 20 years and beyond.

However, despite our strenuous efforts, we have been unable to gain control of a suitable and accessible site close to the centre of the Parish that enjoys sufficient support from all the key stakeholders.  We are sorry and I am personally disappointed to say that we are therefore unable to deliver the Hub that we believed would have been an exciting and lasting asset to our community.

It may be, given more time, that we might have been able to secure a suitable site but, all the time we wait developers and landowners are coming forward with proposals for housing that we don’t support and which the Parish Council is powerless to resist because the Uttlesford Local Plan has been rejected and an acceptable 5 year housing supply pipeline cannot be identified.  If the Neighbourhood Plan is in place we have sound policies that at least offer some chance to control development in our parish.

So, with great reluctance we have been forced to abandon the Community Hub element of the Neighbourhood Plan.

We are now going quickly to bring forward a revised plan that offers protection against over-development in Felsted.  In so doing, we have been mindful of the pressure on the Parish through UDC for additional housing.  Our NP cannot prevent all development in the Parish, but our hope is now, by accepting some limited development,we will have met UDC’s needs for more housing and still have achieved some material gains for our community.

Please come along to the presentation on the 13th (7pm) or 14th April (10am) at the Memorial Hall to hear more.

Kind regards,

Roy A C Ramm

Chairman

Felsted Neighbourhood Plan Steering Group

Further to our earlier news items, we have now written to Uttlesford District Council, calling for the expansion application to be reviewed at national level, against national planning and environmental targets and for us to be given time to consider the thousands of pages of documentation.

You can read our letter here.

We are calling for more time to allow due consideration of the thousands of pages of documents submitted in support of the application. UDC has currently allowed only 6 weeks to submit comments, which also includes the Easter Holiday period. We have argued that this is little more time than would be allowed to consider a loft extension, and cannot be right for a major infrastructure project, resulting in a 44% increase in air traffic when compared to today’s levels.

Comments can be submitted via UDC’s website here.  There are also drop in events organised by the airport, details are here.

These events are timed to give, in the case of the final event, only one working day between the event and the deadline for submission of comments.

We have again objected to this undue haste to process the application. Even Highways England have said that they cannot meet the required deadline, and will not respond before 25th May.

However, without confirmation of a reconsideration by UDC of the process, we must assume that comments will close on 3rd April and anyone wishing to make a comment should therefore do so before this date.

Felsted Parish Council will be  making a submission that Stansted airport’s expansion plans must receive national determination against national air traffic plans and  environmental targets. It is wrong for this to receive only District level review. Furthermore, we shall state that the airport must first resolve the noise nuisance problems caused by the flightpath changes made in 2016, and which have resulted in a 20 fold increase in noise complaints.

You can also read more here on the SSE website, also calling for national determination of the application.

The popular Green Waste skip service is due to begin on 8 April.

As with previous years, the skip will operate at Bannister Green on Sundays between 9-10am.

The service will run through to 25th November 2018.