Borough should blush red at green claims

The text of a letter by Independent Berkhamsted Town Councillor Ian Johnston

in The Hemel Gazette 3rd December 1998.

Councillor Anne Fisher (Letters, November 26) believes that Dacorum Borough Council has backed up its promise to care for the environment. I suggest she visits her optician. I know of no more environmentally destructive council than Dacorum.

Councillor Fisher mentioned that Dacorum has planted over four hundred trees in the last 3 1/2 years. She did not tell us that it has also granted permission for the felling of approximately 200 trees in the Berkhamsted area alone during the same time. Most of these were cut down to make way for new buildings, drives or car parks, or to let light into properties which had, with borough council planning permission, been squeezed into unsuitably small spaces.

Dacorum has consistently failed to conserve historic buildings. Instead it has granted permission for unsympathetic alterations, or demolitions and replacement by ugly boxes.

While other district councils in Hertfordshire protested at the allocations of new houses imposed on them under the County Structure Plan, Dacorum initially wanted to build more than its share. This was based on the Dacorum Housing Needs Survey - a bogus piece of science designed to show that there is a need to build houses, not to determine what the housing need actually is.

Despite the amount of derelict land available in Berkhamsted for redevelopment, and the amount of unattractive building which the town has suffered over the last 40 years, the borough council has decided to build a new housing estate at Bank Mill Lane. Two large areas of land adjacent to Northchurch are to be “held in long term land reserve” - in other words they will be built on too. These estates will be far from local amenities and will consist mainly of expensive houses beyond the means of most local people. They will be car based, socially exclusive and environmentally damaging.

Dacorum granted permission for Berkhamsted’s new Waitrose store with all-party support, against the wishes of local people. Fifteen local shops have gone out of business since it opened, traffic has increased and fewer people now walk in the high street.

There are now fewer recycling facilities in the town centre, because Waitrose does not want them. The borough council printed inaccurate information in the Dacorum Digest about the recycling facilities available there - this conveniently avoided showing up its Waitrose cronies in the bad light they deserve.

I am sorry to conclude that Dacorum Borough Council’s commitment to the environment is largely a piece of window dressing. It wants the public to think it is committed to the environment, but its real motives lie elsewhere.

Councillor Ian Johnston

Independent, Berkhamsted Town Council.

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