Aye up Duckies!

As you know our petition reached over a staggering 1500 signatures and it’s still growing! We submitted our petition to Amber Valley Borough Council on 2nd September and requested a full council debate on protecting our woodland.

Under the AVBC petition procedure, petitions which receive over 1200 signature will receive a full council debate, however, on Thursday 24th November AVBC voted in the full council committee not to have a full debate and to just lump the petition in with all other responses received in the local plan consultation. The Council have shown complete disregard to voters by dismissing our request for them to protect our broadleaved woodland trees, wildlife and community amenity. The petition wasn’t about removing the Leafy Lane site entirely, it was a request to remove the Woodland from the plan! 

Isn’t it is a sorry state of affairs when a democratic petition from residents and council tax payers is ignored?!

What happens now? Well, the petition appears to have been dismissed, they have no plans at this stage to protect the woodland !

I have had this response from Lee Gardner from AVBC legal team to inform me of the following:

“I am writing to update you on the consideration of your petition at Council last week.  As your submission was part of the Local Plan consultation and, as part of the statutory process is for the Secretary of State to appoint an independent person to consider all representations, members agreed that your petition would be submitted as part of the formal process to the Independent Person to consider and report back to the Council.”

From the above statement I can only assume that Leafy Lane woodland is part of the local plan going forward regardless of our petition.

So much for a green and biodiverse country! In local plans, Councils around the UK would rather put forward woodland trees to be chopped down for houses and plant new ones on farms instead of protecting the mature trees that we already have.. no wonder the UK isn’t meeting its green targets with this out of date attitude. And it’s no wonder that the AVBC climate audit report recommends improvement! 

On another note we made the paper!  I had no play on the article but it certainly sums up what happened in the Council meeting!

https://www.derbytelegraph.co.uk/news/local-news/row-over-plans-build-50-7873772

We are not giving up! The fight is not over! For now we wait for the next stage! Watch this space…