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The Stop Little Dunmow Expansion campaign group was formed by local residents in response to a housing proposal lodged by Chater Homes and their agents Green Issues. The housing proposal, named Chelmer Mead, proposes to place a large scale settlement of 3,000 houses between Little Dunmow village and the new A120, joining Little Dunmow to Great Dunmow and extending all the way round towards Felsted joining with the Oakwood Park development. It is important to emphasise the scale of the Chelmer Mead proposal – it is over four times the size of existing ongoing development at Oakwood Park.
To date Chater Homes/Green Issues have paid lip service to community consultation. Whilst four “exhibitions” were held to explain its proposals, these were arranged on short or no notice and held in the immediate run up to Christmas. At the exhibitions we found Green Issues’ representatives to be ill prepared and he plans produced and published by Green Issues were indistinct and unclear - the proposed housing areas being the innocuous white fields encircling Little Dunmow village. Surprisingly, two of the exhibitions were held not locally but rather in Elsenham and Henham and we can only wonder at the rationale for holding exhibitions in these two particular villages. As the Green Issues website only too clearly outlines, they are a politically astute PR company who employ stated methods to achieve planning success. It would appear that Green Issues have been specifically engaged by Chater Homes to drive through an alternative housing proposal.
We believe the Chelmer Mead new settlement proposal is a speculative, opportunistic and poorly thought out scheme which is inconsistent with and fails to meet the objectives set out in the Core Strategy and the key drivers of policy, overall spatial strategy and regional transport strategy objectives contained in the draft East of England Plan.
We were very concerned that detailed information was not in the public domain because the developers (Chater Homes) decided to make their plans public 2 weeks after the Uttlesford District Council (UDC) consultation process for development in the District started. As a result, the official documentation made no mention of it.
Uttlesford District Council advised us that concerned local residents should initially respond to the formal consultation on the 4 options provided. As the Chelmer Mead proposal was put forward at the 11th hour, it was not possible for the Council to consider or possibly include details of this proposal in the current consultation. Development between Great Dunmow and Felsted was promoted by Chater Homes during the Council's previous period of consultation in Jan/Feb 07. At that time Chater Homes did not promote the development as a new settlement as is currently the case, but rather as contributing to the District's housing needs by developing in the A120 corridor. The District Council's current consultation dismisses the option of placing all the housing within the A120 Corridor.
We take a very dim view of Chater Homes' 11th hour announcement of the large development proposals. Such action resulted in a mere four-week period for residents to respond to meet Uttlesford's 11th January 2008 deadline, especially allowing for the Christmas and the New Year celebrations.
It is unfortunate that UDC having put in place an open consultation process that Chater Homes (seemingly acting on the advice of its consultant Green Issues) has sought to undermine that process.