Local Residents Letter

Highmoor or Pogham or Gawber Cum Barugh ?

Councillor Roy Miller wants to give some certainty to developers and landowners in the Local Plan, but he fails to confirm the need to protect the birthrights of current residents and indeed the generations of residents to come.

Barnsley is not a rich town but its people are proud and look to make the best of what they have. A compensatory and double plus factor for residents has always been the cost-free and rapid access to beautiful countryside; indeed the enjoyment of that privilege continues to be an asset of which we can all be rightly proud.

The character of our metropolitan area owes much to the old urban districts recognised and maintained by the old West Riding, those districts still exist and most are easily discernible from neighbouring districts thanks to the ‘greenery’ that surrounds them. This urban individuality has long fuelled local pride and long may it do so.

Reportedly some of us might have to forsake these privileges in the interests of even more urban sprawl; we might be asked to grin and bear a green belt land-grab so that developers might avoid the costly sanitizion of brown field sites and thereby maximize their profits. To my mind opting to reduce the size of the green belt and abandoning the brown field sites to fester until God knows when would be nothing short of sacrilege, it would present us a ‘lose lose’ situation and confirm once and for all that we had joined the race to the bottom.

Councillors are here today and gone tomorrow, they should resist any urge to fritter away our assets in order to strike a deal with developers to facilitate short term economic gain. In any event their role is to merely look after our assets and secure them for the next generation.