There’s been some speculation over what might happen to the Eon site in London Road.
It’s diificult to predict what exactly will happen. Rayleigh needs employment land, and this is good location for continued use as offices. On the other hand, planning consultants were suggesting using this site for housing at least 6 years ago….
Back in 2003, the District Council issued a ‘call for sites’, inviting landowners to suggest possible sites that could be used for housing, so that the council could see what options were available. In the end the coucnil decided that none of these sites were needed at this time. We showed a list of these sites on Onlinefocus back on November 23rd 2003 and wrote:
The District Council is creating a new ?Local Plan? . This will determine what land can be used for housing in the next few years. The Council has already decided what sites it wants to be used for housing – most of this land is off Rawreth Lane, which is not something we are pleased about.
But there are a lot of other people – mostly landowners – who would like their land to be used for housing as well. The Council has said ?no? this time – but don?t be surprised if these people try again in the future.
Anywhere, here is a fairly complete list of people who suggested extra sites for housing land. (by the way, all these names are in a public document, so there? s no problem about telling you.)
And one of the sites on the list was:
Powergen UK – former TXU offices in London Road, Rayleigh Housing Site Allocation – estimated capacity 100
Ron and Chris also put this list on the back of a Downhall and Rawreth Focus. After that we received a fairly stern letter from Powergen, saying that this wasn’t true, and asking us to withdraw our Focus and take this off the website! How it was true – the suggestion had been made by Powergen’s own planning consultants, though it seems that most of the Powergen management didn’t know about this.