Epping Council Set To Ignore Public Opinion on the South Epping Master Plan - Please Attend and Make Your Voice Heard.
- Mar 17
- 2 min read
South Epping Master Plan – the next step.
There is a District Council meeting on Wednesday 19 March, 7:30pm at the Civic Centre; for Cabinet members only; on the agenda -
“to endorse the South Epping Master Plan (SEMPA)”. This will give developers the green light to press ahead with planning applications, leaving the scheme largely unchanged from it’s present highly flawed state.
The Councillors are presented with a 12-page “Executive Summary”:
in which the only mention of the overwhelmingly negative public response to the public consultations is a short paragraph on page 11 :
“There remains concern amongst local residents on a range of issues, the most commonly raised is regarding the potential traffic impacts of the proposals” – which then goes on to state that a traffic assessment has yet to be conducted!
Councillors will also be presented with an “Engagement Report” from the public consultations, as an Appendix – which runs to over 300 pages:
This was only released to the public following a Freedom of Information request by the Epping Society, in late February, leaving very little time to read and consider. It records a massively negative public reaction to nearly all aspects of the Scheme (or please see summary on the Epping Society website, or last week’s Epping Forest Guardian newspaper, Everything Epping Forest etc). These 300+ pages are condensed into the one paragraph in the Executive Summary!
The Epping Society asks -
Concerned members of the public, please attend the Cabinet meeting. Try to speak to your Councillors beforehand, remind them of the strength and variety of public concerns. Do they intend to vote against the expressed wishes of a sizeable number of their constituents – the very people they are supposed to represent?
It would be a telling gesture if attendees could all take a copy of the pie chart as a silent protest, presented here:
Councillors – please at least skim the Engagement Report before the meeting. As a minimum, please look at the pie charts on pages 35, 54-60, 120-131 and take a dip into the 100 or so pages of verbatim criticisms made about the project.
The South Epping project is lining up to be a fine disaster, it should be halted for a thorough review – at the very least.
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