Your Letters: December 13

BEWARE COUNCIL LAND SELL-OFF

You want a valuable present for Christmas? Take a piece of council land. You’ll not be challenged at this time of the year. Council itself believes, that in the run-up to Christmas people don’t notice controversial planning applications. They won’t notice the loss of a few metres of public green space. They’ve been giving our land away for years. No cost. Just put up a fence. Claim squatter’s rights.

During the period of austerity council was selling off its assets, our assets to cover its budgetary losses. The Hepworth is the best known ‘sale’, but small pieces of land were given away to householders or sold at knockdown prices ‘to reduce maintenance costs’. When taxpayers did not kick up a fuss our council became bolder. A care less culture developed.

Wolverhampton Council sold a piece of invaluable land to itself, gave outline planning permission for 14 houses and anticipated a bonanza. It took eight years of resistance by Friends of the WEC before a four-borough protest against development on green spaces led to the collapse of the Black Country Plan. The Smestow Valley Local Nature Reserve (LNR) was saved from development. The wishes of voters to the Neighbourhood Plan were upheld.

However, the care less culture had morphed into a do-nothing culture against householders who encroached on the LNR. New fences appeared, inside the boundary of the reserve. A few metres here to erect a garden shed. A few metres there for a jacuzzi. ‘Garden creep.’ It was like the Wild West where settlers erected fences on the prairies with the connivance of the US federal government.