News story

5th January 2004

Stadium Protest Planned at South Gloucestershire Council Offices

Northavon MP Steve Webb will be joined by residents of Easter Compton and Pilning outside the South Gloucestershire Council offices at Thornbury on Monday 5th January at 1.45pm to protest at plans for 2000 houses and a 30,000 seater sports stadium at land between the two villages. At 2pm, the Council’s Cabinet will meet to consider their response to the “masterplan” for Severnside, and the MP will present to them the results of his survey of Easter Compton and Pilning residents which reveals massive opposition to the plans.

The meeting will also hear from Easter Compton resident Sally Garbett, who helped to organise the survey and who will report the major concerns of residents about traffic and environmental implications of the plans. At the end of the meeting, the Cabinet is expected to vote on whether to support or oppose an amendment to the local plan to accommodate the Redrow/Severnvale Stadium proposal.

At the meeting, Steve Webb will highlight the inadequacies of Redrow’s public consultation process:

Redrow’s own consultation document says: “...the purpose of this consultation exercise was always about what sort of development should take place, if and when the site was allocated for the proposed uses, rather than the principle of development itself”. 

In other words, they did not ask local people if they wanted the development at all!

Redrow consulted on the basis of 1,600 houses but now plans to build 2,000 houses.  The traffic and environmental implications of this are likely to be even more serious: access to the site from the B4055 was intended to be via public service vehicles only, but Redrow have now overturned this restriction and private car access will now be possible from the B4055.  Again, the impact on Easter Compton and Pilning residents will be much more severe than in the scheme on which Redrow originally consulted.

The MP will cite responses from over 200 residents of Easter Compton and Pilning to his own survey who were more than 85% opposed to the proposal and will urge the Cabinet to oppose this change to the local plan.