Greenstead Independents

Hundreds of trees planted on the slopes by Ghost Wood yesterday. Funded by the council as part of their effort to plant 200,000 trees in the Woodland Project.
Round of applause for Together We Grow CIC & the Big Friendly Gardeners, the students from the University of Essex and the volunteers who made it out!
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Count of student beds in Greenstead so far...
1,680.

A FOI response from the council regarding the hedge that was pulled out in Salary Brook. Seems ECC as the Lead Local Flood Authority (LLFA) "do not object to the granting of planning permission" in relation to the lack of drawings outlining the works to dig out part of the Brook for flood compensation storage.
https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/sa lary_brook_works…

Started trying to figure out how many students homes there are on Greenstead. On the first website alone, of the 92 student places available to rent 60% are on Greenstead. 63% of those homes on Greenstead are 3 bed and upwards. That's a total of nearly 300 beds!
Again, this is just the first website I looked at and doesn't include any of the 1000s of beds in purpose built student blocks.
... We don't have a housing crisis on Greenstead, it's a student crisis. A crisis the University is only going to make worse as it plans to expand from 16,000 students to 20,000 by 2024. The way things are going Greenstead is going to have to house another 4000 students because only for the first year of residence does the Uni. provide accommodation. To paraphrase the leader of the council who lives in Wivenhoe, he'll protect Wivenhoe residents first. That'd be the same leader who literally voted to "recognise the importance" of building in the land known as Salary Brook (while complaining about developers building in the Brook!) for "potential strategic growth" reasons.
In layman's terms that means build near Greenstead not us in Wivenhoe.
Remember that the next time the council says we're so short of houses we need to build literally on top of existing residents.
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Hello folks. A little update on the garden villages as the plan goes before the inspector next week.
Garden Villages, what are they?
They're a plan to put all our housing needs either side of Colchester for the next 45 years. Despite the crap that the likes of Rosie Pearson and CAUSE Campaign Against Urban Sprawl in Essex have fed you they're not a plan to build 40,000 unnecessary houses. They're a plan to build the exact same 920 homes per year we would build if we didn't b...uild the things. The only difference is if we do it in a GV fashion we get more control, more investment, more affordable houses than not doing it in that fashion. There's also going to be 100s of jobs on our doorstep for decades because of it. Once the East GV reaches around the 4,000 house mark there's plans to build new schools (1 secondary, 4 primary) and a new health centre. If we don't build GVs and just add them on ad-hoc wherever we can there isn't enough concentration of housing in any one spot to warrant the building of new facilities. The link road and the new bus routes go in on day one to encourage new residents to start using them from the off.
You'll have to make your own minds up but personally I think it's a no-brainer. Build 40,000 houses without additional investment or build 40,000 houses with additional investment. Not building 40,000 houses isn't on the table and those that haven't met their quota have had Govt. rock up and start zoning land for development themselves.
90% of Rosie and CAUSE's argument is based on NIMBYism because Rosie lives in Coggeshall and doesn't want them near her. It's funny how a group named after campaigning against urban expansion has tried to have them shunted over to out doorstep, Middlewick range, all the little green spaces around town, literally anywhere that wasn't near them.
Rosie is a two-faced lying .... who tries to convince people that the whole 45 year project is being delivered in the next 15 year period just for graphic effect. We do have enough land to meet our housing needs for the 15 years, that much is true. That's not the point though. The point was how do we maximise the return in that 15 year period. The answer to that one being make it part of a larger 45 year plan.
Yes, NEGC have spent £7m so far. Half of that was given to them by Govt. so we've so far returned an additional £100m in investment for our £3.5m spend.
Garden villages could be hugely beneficial to the estate.
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Volunteers needed to get Greenstead's collective opinion about development here down on paper.

There it is folks, the sale of the NHS!
Currently seeking bids for cardiology, gynaecology, paediatrics and oncology.
https://www.sbs.nhs.uk/

You've probably seen recently that 175m of hedgerow has been pulled out of the Brook by the developer Osborne. I just thought I'd give you a little update with some of the facts as everybody blames everybody else for it!
On the other side of Clingoe Hill off Elmstead Road Osborne are developing 135 student flats. Because the site of the student flats sits in a flood risk area part of the plan was to raise the ground there to minimise future risk to the site. Doing so lost 939... cu m of 'flood storage'. To compensate for this they excavated on the other side of the road (in Salary Brook) to create more flood storage there bring the total to 1740 cu m resulting in a net gain of 34 cu m. I've added the paragraph (6.6) mentioning it as one of the images.
Now, Essex County Council are the authority as far as the water way goes and their response to the flood risk assessment produced was to highlight that a plan for 'flood compensation' was included but add it was lacking a drawing and request one. Added as the 2nd image.
ECC's responsibility in this is just the flood risk assessments, Colchester Borough Council are the planning authority (for what it's worth!) and it was their responsibility to sign off on the planning application. CBC's response to the planning application was to recommend it for approval and then vote it through. There were 18 conditions attached to the application but none of them were related to the works in the Brook.
What's done is done, the developer has accepted they're the ones who pulled the hedge out and are going to replace it but as this is a failure in the process what's done is likely to get done again. Especially with the Garden Villages on the horizon. This doesn't mean the Garden Villages are a bad idea, it does however mean the council needs to have a serious look at the process that allowed a developer to put in application for excavating the nature reserve and actually get permission to do so.
Because, at the end of the day, the council signed and approved the developer's application! Digging up the Brook wasn't an accident.
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