68 High Street, Hadleigh, Ipswich IP7 5EF kelvin@keithavis.co.uk
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Please write to: Kelvin Avis 68 High Street, Hadleigh, Ipswich IP7 5EF or email: kelvin@keithavis.co.uk
Dear Sir Our congratulations to Cllr Sian Dawson for stopping the myopic Babergh Cabinet decision to introduce car parking charges in Hadleigh when the current pandemic is still raging. The retail sector needs as much support as we can provide as it struggles with recovery, and anything that works against that never made sense. Babergh DC can comfortably manage the cost of supporting free parking within its overall budget and can do so for the foreseeable future. However, car parking charges is only half of the problem. The next challenge is the provision of sufficient car parking to meet Hadleigh’s long term requirements. The Babergh draft Joint Local Plan for Hadleigh shows that the Council is likely to approve the building of more than 700 houses between 2018 and 2037, just when the Council plans to give up a roughly 100 vehicle car park at Corks Lane for housing development. To do so is yet another example of non-joined up thinking by Babergh. It is likely that the building these 700 houses will lead to more than 1000 additional cars, that will require car parking provision in a town that is already at capacity. Babergh will claim that it needs to build four properties on the Corks Lane car park to make its development of the old Council buildings viable. That claim no longer holds water as its original anticipated costings for the development have been overtaken by significant increases in building materials to the point that they are meaningless. The trade-off of losing 100 car parking spaces to create just 4 houses never did make sense, and Babergh should now look at selling off the old Council offices to a developer which would in turn potentially allow for retention of the car park. Babergh has been talking about a Hadleigh “Vision” for years, and it’s time that the talk was turned to action. Residents are tired of short term planning decisions and a good starting point for joined up vision in 2022 would be to look at how it can retain all three main car parks in Hadleigh, rather than give one up for a questionable return with no alternative solutions on offer. Alan Ferguson