Today’s Dunmow & Stansted Observer leads with a positive story about the shifting pattern of retailing in Stansted. Lower Street shopkeepers are interviewed. They all want improvements – such as short-stay, on-street parking – but they are upbeat. My own quoted comment about the need to sell the advantages of doing business in Stansted Mountfitchet is a theme that will be pressed strongly over coming months and years.

So far all the papers have continued the anguish and argument over the council’s draft local plan. Council leader Jim Ketteridge has hit back in the Walden Local and the Saffron Walden Reporter’s letters page 7 at Lib Dem Opposition leader David Morson’s letter of last week. My letter of last week is also criticised on the same page by a Henham resident who seems to have misundertood my point about specific sites being given the “amber planning light”.

A Stansted resident claims that all political parties have been lacking in the quest for new homes. There is some truth in that; but there is a limit to how far seven Lib Dems can stand up against 30-odd Conservatives who insist on doing things their way.

News was emerging this week of a select, secret sub-group of the private LDF working group, apparently due to meet next on 30th August. So the plot thickens! (Update 17 August: after protests from several concerned councillors, this secret meeting has been cancelled. A rethink, hopefully leading to a fresh and more open approach, is underway.)

Last week’s explanation by the council in the Reporter about LDF working group minutes explaining what’s been going on was misleading; the minutes deserve a Nobel Prize for Labyrinthine Literature!

More letters on the planning theme appear on page 6 of  the Reporter. The Dunmow Broadcast letters page publishes all the competing letters. The Saffron Walden Weekly News runs some of the letters on page 6 and page 7.