Sometimes its nice to be wrong.
We were afraid that hardly anybody would turn up to the windmill today to see the council exhibition on future development , but the small room they used was packed out. Rayleigh people are very concerned about this issue, and we were right to ask for it to come back to Rayleigh on another day.
We also noticed that people were mostly disappointed with what they saw – they could see a proposal for 1800 houses in Rayleigh, but it wasn’t being clearly explained to them that they could object to this figure.
There was also a large turnout of concerned Rawreth residents at their exhibition last Thursday. Indeed the officers said they were completely taken by surprise by the number of people attending. They said they had not had this kind of response at any of the previous exhibitions.
It was pointed out that this because the residents of Rawreth, and also Rawreth Parish Council were very worried indeed at the prospect of 1800 houses being built in their area. Many residents were very angry indeed at the prospect and again, the officers were very vague in their responses and did not advise that objections could be made to their proposals..
It is now essential that all those who attended, and all those who were unable to go, write in clearly stating their objections and saying what we all believe, the houses should be spread around the whole district, giving fair shares for all.
This is the only way we are going to retain the “village” nature of our area and not turn a village into a town.