More unwanted homes waved through by council

So as I feared – what we all knew full-well would happen again in the light of recent bitter experience, has happened again .

As sure as night follows day, planning for construction of yet another batch of unwanted, unsuitable and unnecessary houses has just been waved through by the council, who now seem to have given up bothering with even any token pretence of protecting Lancashire’s interests, heritage, environment or culture by actually examining these applications at all.

This week the offending items are going to be dumped behind Pendle Street East in Sabden (and so this completes the encirclement of my home when combined with other recently completed developments), but as we all know, this is nowhere near an isolated attack – the out-of-touch central government seems hell-bent on covering much of Lancashire with unwanted houses for no good reason. Meanwhile the local council appears content to just watch the dam burst and observe the destruction from a safe distance.

There is obviously no demand for large numbers of new houses in Sabden. Not from the indigenous population, nor from anybody else.

It is clear from the rather long-standing and static forest of fading “for sale” and “to let” signs in Sabden (and elsewhere in the Ribble Valley) that more people sadly seem to want to leave Sabden now than to move there.

This may be because they don’t want to stay in a soulless concrete hyper-housing estate and perpetual building site(s).

Sabden village was a delightful place. In future, Greater Sabden is far less likely to be the same.

The politicians appear to be so breath-takingly out of touch with reality and public opinion that they might as well be sitting on the moon as down in London (in fact, that might not be such a bad idea!).

Arguably, there really is a shortage of certain types of homes for certain types of people in London itself – but this could easily be tackled in London – a far better solution to this shortage would be to convert the massive-but-under-utilised Houses of Parliament site into expensive luxury flats to be used as second homes for the MPs’ non-taxpaying billionaire chums when visiting London from abroad – and also for their city bonus-gorged banker mates. The palace of Westminster is, after all, largely unused, empty space (as has been widely reported recently, MPs normally only turn up briefly to allow claiming their appearance money and travel expenses and then either go home, or go to the heavily subsidised bars) and there appears to be very little going on which is of any use to the public and taxpayers, which these MPs mockingly describe themselves as “serving”.

The one or two that turn up for meetings and debates could more easily and more efficiently carry out their posturing and lying to each other in, say, a phonebox at the end of Westminster bridge, while all the rest can carry on boozing all day, as usual.

They can just as easily do this in a pub up the road. MPs can surely afford London beer prices on their generous expenses and salaries, without needing free beer and food paid for by us in their heavily-subsidised Parliament bars and canteens.

So this predominantly London-based housing problem would be addressed at source and there would then be no need or excuse at all for all these unwanted, unnecessary, unsuitable, largely unused housing developments infecting Lancashire towns and villages.

Of course, getting anything useful to take place in the unused, empty space located between many of our politicians ears may prove far more challenging.

Paul Bunyan,

Pendle Street East, Sabden