When confronted by residents in 2018 about the collapsing infrastructure caused by vast numbers of new housing estates cropping up the length and breadth of Cornwall, this was the reasoning and defence provided by Bob Egerton (Probus councillor and Cornwall Council Cabinet chairman) and Phil Mason (formerly Chief of Planning and now Director of Strategy).
Shortly after that meeting, Phil Mason presented to Cornwall Councillors his grand plans for the Langarth (between Chiverton Cross and Treliske Hospital) development of around 4,000 homes initially. In that meeting, he called his own planning at Threemilestone - the so-called Truro western corridor - a “mess”, and in the same breath, asked permission to borrow another £600 million, to expand further. Councillors approved the extraordinary plans and shortly after, promoted Phil Mason from chief planner to director of strategy!
So in light of this, you may not be so shocked to read more outrageous planning stories below, from our completely out of control and out of ideas Cornwall council planning department:
Shame on Cornwall Council! Shame on Cornwall's Planners!
Do Cornwall's planners and councillors need to re-think their priorities?
For several years now, we have said a very firm yes!
Has anyone visited seaside towns and villages recently and seen the destruction caused by speculative and out of character development and by the scourge of second homes and Air BnBs?
In Carbis Bay woodland was destroyed to allow for a G7 Summit. The legacy? Spiralling Covid rates caused by that event as confirmed by journalist Andrew Marr and the return of tourism.
We have been sent a copy of an email written by a Conservative Cornwall Councillor, one of those elected by 15% of Cornwall's overall electorate because most have given up on voting, which confirms this was anticipated back in March. This has been sent to the media.
Portreath is a classic example of a damaged seaside village. Some of our team were there today photographing some of the horrible structures which have cluttered the hillsides. What a mess!
That's because big money speaks in Cornwall whilst the Cornish people are condemned to a sub standard life in caravans, on boats and on sofas belonging to others, a sub species destined to serve the tourists with their ice creams, a sub species queuing at the food banks, to which the truly great Don Gardner invited Johnson to visit whilst quaffing his expensive wines at the G7 fiasco. This is the Johnson who never even had the courtesy to respond to our Don.
We are witnessing the cleansing of an indigenous people before our very eyes by calculated population movement.
Permission has been handed out to mega-developers to build thousands of hotch potch houses to meet external demand and to squeeze speculative money out of our Cornwall yet a local fisherman from a longstanding Cornish family who could never aspire to own the houses being built for incomers and second and even third homeowners has been refused permission to build one house.
Isn't it odd that objections raised by so many in respect of other developments by big developers go unheeded but suddenly become relevant and are taken carefully in to account when dealing with a local fisherman?
We have therefore circulated this to every Cornwall Councillor (bar one who we refuse to deal with), to all six of the MPs in Cornwall and to the wider media including overseas with this message for Cornwall Council......SHAME ON YOU!
It happened before and it may happen again - a blockade at Cornwall Council's offices in Truro!
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One commentator notes:
“Cornwall has found lots of new giant and very un-Cornish estates, generally for London landlords, lots of new high street shops and supermarkets with HQs across the Tamar, lots and lots of cars, loads of funding for white elephants generating profits that are usually syphoned out of the Duchy, lots of zero hours part time and seasonal low paid jobs, a massive rise in raw sewage overflow into streams, bays, ports, rivers, wells, fields and water courses and lots of atrocious looking second/holiday home bunkers, but just able to patch up existing roads - unless we pay for new estate ones - a huge drop in hospital beds per person, surgery and school places & funding per person, collapse in clean air, a decimation of fishing and farming, and a total evaporation of Cornish community soul and spirit across most of its market towns and villages. Thanks Cornwall council! Celebrating 25 years of crass incompetence, complacency, waste, maladministration, corruption, graft, ineptitude and lame, spineless & arrogant behaviour, generally by egotistical senior officers and councillors. A tragedy developing daily before our very eyes, and still Phil Mason is in a job, taking some £200,000pa from ordinary Cornish taxpayers for creating what he himself described as “a mess”; councillors called it planning... and promoted him. Makes me want to cry.”
Whilst another adds:
“Simon Emerson, Phil Mason and a few others should have been thrown out of Newquay’s Atlantic hotel in stocks for their wholesale daylight robbery of Cornwall, right in front of us, and despite our very loud, sound, legal and reasoned vocal speeches and remonstrations in May 2016. Unbelievable what power, money and corporates get away with, without even the need to hide behind closed doors and smoke filled secret meetings. This was right in front of us, and senior Cornwall council officers and (not many) councillors watched it all and were happy to stick the boot in. The irony is that we were shocked at the 47,500 units to be built in the (2010-30) Plan; we were then incensed by the extra 5,000 Emerson-inspired second/holiday homes added to the total. Yet in 2021, or nine years ahead of the final year of that Plan, we’ve actually had 60,000 monstrous Wain, Persimmon, Linden, Taylor Wimpey low-quality “boxes” already built and nobody gives a damn. So you’re right, let the stupid masses - especially the new arrivals escaping their rotten criminal over-sized cities - sink in their own faulty, overloaded sewerage systems and abandoned mining works. Maybe then we’ll get 35 protestors to turn up!
That’ll learn ‘em.”
https://www.cornwalllive.com/news/cornwall-news/smock-shop-owner-says-st-5610565