Brookwood Lye continues to cause me immense frustration and stress because as we know, no decision has been made on how the site will proceed.
Some residents asked questions at the Executive meetings late last year and the beginning of this and I believed some of the answers were deliberately intended to confuse. This obfuscatory approach by the Leader of the Council led to two of the questions being asked again with minor tweaks at the next Executive meeting because the answers could deliberately be left open to interpretation. Not much use when you are trying to establish facts and not particularly open and honest.
Anyway, the key take away was that no decisions had been made.
As you head down Brookwood Lye towards St. Johns, the final house of four on the right seems to be being refurbished. This seems strange for a house that is due to be demolished. As this picture shows, new windows have been installed in the property.
Further, the property has had new fencing put up round the perimeter of the plot. From the photo above it looks like a heat pump of some sort may have been installed.
The image below shows the original vision for the site that I have effectively been working on since around 2013, including the Traveller site and the 128 properties that make up the completed development. It also has a blue line running through it. That blue line represents a new fence that is similar to the fence that fronts on to the road. The only opportunity to see this is from a train as it’s not visible from the road. That has been installed very recently and funnily enough is in the place where the expanded Traveller site was planned to expand to. Note the new size of the area given over to the Traveller site. My non-scientific view is that it is far in excess of double the size.
No decision has been made (apparently), but I think we can see that with the house being renovated, and the blue fence being installed, that the decisions have been made and the concept of neighbourhood consultation or even caring about what residents think has gone out of the window.
It seems obvious to me that the current Liberal Democrat administration at WBC have informally made the decisions. I guess formally they will make the decisions after the election (conveniently) and then use a sham consultation process via a planning application to push this through once the decisions can’t be reversed.
Make no mistake, this will lead to far fewer homes than originally visioned, a tripling in size of the area managed by the Travellers, and no opportunity to widen the crossroads or provide on-street electric charging at that point as was planned. It’s particularly galling after the Leader of the Council publicly stated last year that I was misleading residents after my October blog post. See the post here. It seems like I wasn’t misleading residents.
I don’t think WBC is being honest with the residents of Brookwood, has not intended on being so since last year and will continue to treat the residents as fools.
Kevin
Cllr Kevin Davis 