From Peter Lloyd, East Cowes:

The proposed number of housing at Crossways has increased in a few weeks from 154 at the public consultation to a possible 165 for outline planning.

Why does this IW Council administration seem to have a gung-ho, cavalier attitude when it comes to so-called regeneration consisting of housing and yet more housing? I know the council’s income is tight but all this administration can see is the pound signs, from the selling of assets such as the land to build houses, section 106 monies paid by the builder and council tax income.

They will also tell you the development will create employment. Yes, at the construction stage, but no long term employment helping the town’s economy. This has been proved with the unfinished Hawthorn Meadows development and other completed ones. 

If you add up the housing developments that have been completed within East Cowes, plus the proposed developments including Crossways, Albany Road, Maresfield Road, the Phoenix and Trinity House marshalling yards and the possible Springhill/ Norris Castle estate, then without exaggeration the number of new houses built in East Cowes since the start of the regeneration programme, would be more than the suggested 2,000 homes of the proposed new village at Wellow. 

East Cowes has had more than its fair share; it has doubled in size and is unable to cope with the numbers of people wishing to move here. 

The decision makers will not be affected by their decisions, but the people of East Cowes and Whippingham will be for ever more. They need to understand the implications of this scheme and how their decision will affect the local area and the Island as a whole. 

Local schools, doctors, dentist and drainage are at full capacity now. It will also increase the pressure on the Island road network and social services. 

The building of housing pockets, such as Crossways, helps to destroy the local community by forming an isolated pocket of residents within the town’s community, having an adverse impact on the town. This outskirts-of-town housing will be of very little benefit to the East Cowes town centre and its vibrancy. They will most probably head into Newport. 

The IW Council need to listen to, and represent, the residents by withdrawing this planning application, as the majority of local residents are opposed to it.

They are going against their own planning department’s Island Plan by building on a greenfield site that is the last open field preventing the merger of the settlements of East Cowes and Whippingham. 

Building on this open space would destroy the ecology and environment that the site is now giving.