IT seems to me that Tony Dixon (Gazette letters, February 9) is leading us to believe the housing register is a list of homeless people or families waiting to get a home.
For clarification, Arun District Council describes the register as homeless people, council tenants or registered landlord tenants who wish to change their home, and people who want to relocate.
The council describes these as “home seekers”. This is not to say the situation is not serious, however, as I understand it, the council is approaching the requirement for housing with its housing allocation scheme, so something is being done.
Mr Dixon suggested that Eco-Town at Ford/Yapton/Climping was to include affordable housing and would have had a great effect in reducing or eliminating the housing problem in Arun, but I doubt this, as neither his Enterprise Hub nor the developers could put a price on what was considered to be affordable.
Mr Dixon is trying to make us believe that it would take land the size of Arundel to build the amount of homes to meet the numbers on the housing register. He came to this conclusion by comparing the number of households and the size of the ward, but omitted to say that Arundel has a castle, castle grounds, cathedral and the land stretching up to the Wetland Centre.
The calculation for the land requirement seems questionable as, using his example and taking a ward like Toddington and Wick, which has approximately the same number of households as Arundel, but is considerably smaller, thus one could say the size of the ward of Wick and Toddington would be the size of the building land. Not very accurate. People signed the petition against the so called Eco-Town because the proposal was unworkable. One after another of the developers’ ideas were withdrawn when proved to be so. This was borne out when the then government turned down the proposal.
We who signed the petition have nothing to reproach ourselves for by opposing the destruction of the three parishes, the pollution, (waste burning plant and lorries bringing in the waste) and the lack of infrastructure. The development at Ford was to be built on the green fields around the concrete airfield, which was to be maintained for the market and boot sale. I must add, the green fields are at present being used to grow crops.
Richard Brennan
Wooldridge Walk
Climping
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