I am worried about Sandown. It's in a dreadful state.

On a recent holiday, on mentioning we lived in Sandown some of our fellow guests immediately referred to it as oh; 'RUNDOWN' and others compared it to Beirut and sadly we couldn't in fact disagree with their withering assessment.

What we need to do to improve it is to get central government to pass a law which states, that any property left in a state of disrepair for more than a year, should be forfeited to the local council without compensation and when renovation has started it must be fully completed within a year or it also becomes council property without compensation.

I realise that our present self serving and incompetent government, whose Tory and Freemason mates usually own such properties, will be unlikely to agree to such a law but for the sake of our Island economy, with its reliance on tourism we must try to encourage them to introduce it.

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If we do not, numbers of decent and upstanding traders trying to run a business in Sandown will continue to suffer and it will never regain its once; outstanding reputation.

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