Today’s Observer covers the car park controversy at Lower Street, Stansted. The report commissioned by the parish council on whether the car park can accommodate the extra vehicles for an almost 4,000 sq. metres (almost 30,000 sq. feet) development including a health centre is due out later today. A Stansted resident, Ray Woodcock, has criticised the parish council for spending £1,000 on the report “at this very late stage”. Stansted’s parish and district councillors have been pressing the district council to carry out a professional assessment since May. It hasn’t, so the parish is having to do the district’s job for it. The report to the planning committee next Wednesday once again recommends approval. (An earlier planning application was refused on May 30th.) The report suggests that approval would be withdrawn “if the required parking improvement has not been forthcoming”. But no professional has assessed what the requirements are. This approach risks the rules being made up after approval to suit the desired answer. We want a health centre in Stansted. We do not want traffic and parking chaose for decades to come because planners have so far avoided a professional evaluation of what proper parking provision should be.

On the letters page of the Observer and the Reporter Councillor David-James Sadler, a Conservative from Saffron Walden, attacks the Liberal Democrats for a “flip-flop to oppose the policy of (housing) dispersal” as the alleged real reason for tabling a council motion last week calling for openness and transparency in planning at Uttlesford. He presents no evidence for this assertion and I know that it is untrue! The Lib Dems continue to support the principle of dispersal. Very Sad, Cllr Sadler!

As one member of the public put it to me today: “They (the Tories) thought the Lib Dems would go along with any old distributed solution, however badly thought out. The fact that they are unable to defend in public the plan they stitched up in private totally explains their subsequent behaviour.”