Council must back the people - Your Letters

Sponsored by

Council must back the people

Published on 04/11/2012 11:38

Parish council chairman Anna Worthington-Leese says she and fellow councillors are ‘committed to working for the community’. One wonders what community that is.

Hundreds of residents of Storrington and Sullington have made plain their opposition to the proposed massive expansion of Waitrose. Many have signed petitions, written letters and attended parish meetings to voice their disquiet.

On Tuesday October 23 I was one of dozens of people who attended the parish meeting in the hope that our ‘representatives’ would listen to mounting concerns. Apart from the Waitrose property manager not a single person spoke in favour of the application.

Five local residents gave thoughtful, well presented arguments against the current proposals. These are not NIMBYISTS opposed to any development. It is the scale of the expansion that is at issue.

The massive footprint and double decker car-park are totally out of scale for Storrington and will inevitably ramp up the pollution and congestion levels that already plague the village.

You might have thought that councillors would have the courtesy to listen respectfully to the reasons why local people are so concerned.

Instead the contempt for the people in the hall was breath-taking in its arrogance. Anybody who doesn’t agree with the parish council is dismissed as a ‘vociferous’ minority.

I am not a member of the ‘Save our Storrington’ group but having witnessed the particular ire directed against them can only conclude they have the council rattled. Perhaps it is because despite the council’s claims to represent the ‘silent majority’ it secretly knows it is out of touch with the views of the community it purports to represent.

Come on councillors – stop hiding behind the claim that you have to do as you’re told by ‘the professionals’. Do what you’re meant to do - get behind the people you represent and hold Waitrose to account.

Resist the scale of the development and make sure that any development improves rather than swamps the village.

AMANDA AVISS

Water Lane, Storrington

Community

Looking for...

Featured advertisers

Jobs

Search for a job

Motors

Search for a car

Make Model Price from Price to

Property

Search for a house

Buy Rent

Bedrooms Price from Price from Price to Price to

What is a Cookie?
What is a Flash Cookie?
Can I opt out of receiving Cookies?
About our Cookies

Cookies are small data files which are sent to your browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome etc) from a website you visit. They are stored on your electronic device.
This is a type of cookie which is collected by Adobe Flash media player (it is also called a Local Shared Object) - a piece of software you may already have on your electronic device to help you watch online videos and listen to podcasts.
Yes there are a number of options available, you can set your browser either to reject all cookies, to allow only "trusted" sites to set them, or to only accept them from the site you are currently on.

However, please note - if you block/delete all cookies, some features of our websites, such as remembering your login details, or the site branding for your local newspaper may not function as a result.
The types of cookies we, our ad network and technology partners use are listed below:
- Revenue Science ►
  
  A tool used by some of our advertisers to target adverts to you based on pages you have visited in the past. To opt out of this type of targeting you can visit the 'Your Online Choices' website by clicking here.
- Google Ads ►
  
  Our sites contain advertising from Google; these use cookies to ensure you get adverts relevant to you. You can tailor the type of ads you receive by visiting here or to opt out of this type of targeting you can visit the 'Your Online Choices' website by clicking here.
- Webtrends / Google Analytics ►
  
  This is used to help us identify unique visitors to our websites. This data is anonymous and we cannot use this to uniquely identify individuals and their usage of the sites.
- Dart for Publishers ►
  
  This comes from our ad serving technology and is used to track how many times you have seen a particular ad on our sites, so that you don't just see one advert but an even spread. This information is not used by us for any other type of audience recording or monitoring.
- ComScore ►
  
  ComScore monitor and externally verify our site traffic data for use within the advertising industry. Any data collected is anonymous statistical data and cannot be traced back to an individual.
- Local Targeting ►
  
  Our Classified websites (Photos, Motors, Jobs and Property Today) use cookies to ensure you get the correct local newspaper branding and content when you visit them. These cookies store no personally identifiable information.
- Grapeshot ►
  
  We use Grapeshot as a contextual targeting technology, allowing us to create custom groups of stories outside out of our usual site navigation. Grapeshot stores the categories of story you have been exposed to. Their privacy policy and opt out option can be accessed here.
- Subscriptions Online ►
  
  Our partner for Newspaper subscriptions online stores data from the forms you complete in these to increase the usability of the site and enhance user experience.
- Add This ►
  
  Add This provides the social networking widget found in many of our pages. This widget gives you the tools to bookmark our websites, blog, share, tweet and email our content to a friend.
- 3rd Party Cookies ►
  
  We use Advertising agencies to provide us with some of the advertising on our websites. These include (but are not limited to) Specific Media, The Rubicon Project, AdJug, AdConion, Context Web. Please click on the provider name to visit their opt-out page.

Sponsored by
Council must back the people

Top stories

Community