LETTER: Will we be represented over A27?

People traveling along the A27 would view a road uninterrupted by junctions, crossings etc an ‘improvement’.

Those of us who need to cross the A27 to go about our daily lives would consider less traffic and safe crossings for people who live here an ‘improvement’.

A new bypass north of Chichester would be an improvement not least because of the increased capacity it would create. If you are a landowner, councillor or live close to the Northern Route, if we knew where that was, you would oppose the idea. How are we to get a fair consensus?

Let us also bear in mind that Highways England is only interested in moving traffic along the whole of the A27 and not in how local people get around. This is what our councillors are for.

Chris Grayling seems to have an interest only in moving traffic along the A27. He has failed to ensure we have a reliable train service and has failed to come up with an acceptable scheme to ‘improve’ the A27.

The A27 was meant to run from Folkestone to Honiton but has not achieved that yet. The existing part runs roughly from Brighton though East and West Sussex and part of Hampshire.

Chichester District Council is permitting thousands of new houses and a commercial centre to be built immediately adjacent to the A27, so have Arun District Council and so on along the route of the road. It doesn’t need much intelligence to see that these houses etc will put hundreds of thousands more vehicles on the road to compound the problems.

The hundreds of houses being built in our parish of Oving will contribute no financial benefit to the parish coffers via the parish precept, as should normally happen, but the council tax will go to only the district and county councils. Our parish is to be squeezed and deprived. This development will surely turn this area into ‘Chichester New Town’ and wipe out our countryside.

The relentless building happening and planned for the south’s coastal plain, the area squashed in between the South Downs National Park and the sea, is so dense and stealing the green belt agricultural land that I can only guess that we will soon be known as Outer London. House prices here are cheaper than London, London Boroughs will be waiting to buy these properties up. I don’t think Shopwyke Lakes has many ‘affordable’ homes for local people. Even ‘Outer London’ will need better transport than the patch up scheme Highways England have pitched to us. Let’s face it even those proposals will not be fit for purpose by the time the are completed.

Are our councillors going to do what they have been elected for and represent us? Maybe our MP will represent us as well?