THERE have been so many good controversial items in the Standard of late that I am spoilt for choice in responding, so I write to comment on two.

People are calling Essex the Pothole County.

We now have the Essex County Council cabinet member Kevin Bentley apparently about to throw money at a problem that is basically the fault of the county council in the first place.

The use of cheaper or inferior materials on our county’s roads over the years to save money has rebounded with the road surfaces now disintegrating at an alarming rate.

It is a situation well known by the highway contractors and presumably Mr Bentley and his predecessors, Their motto has been “save money now and pay later”.

Roy Pipe, one of the best Maldon District Council chairmen we have had in the past, writes an excellent letter (Standard October 11) on the fiasco we know as the Local Development Plan and its coming effect on Heybridge.

It should encourage people to write strongly in response to the public consultation, closing on October 31.

This is an open invite for people to comment on the present situation where we have a developer who received his planning approval on the basis of a flood alleviation scheme, which they now refuse to implement.

Yet they still wish to proceed to cover a mass of Heybridge under bricks and concrete... 1,100 houses.

But never mind they are apparently now promising to provide a residential care facility, retail units, a school, relief roads etc, as reported by the Standard recently.

I would have thought that people, and planners, would regard those promises perhaps in the same category as the promised , ill fated, flood alleviation scheme.

Oh, I forgot the extra 30 per cent “affordable housing” sweetener, nationally known as “the houses no one can afford”.

A few years ago as a district councillor I, along with three other councillor, refused to vote in favour of this entire scheme which I said at the time, and often since, will ruin Heybridge in many ways.

For example we can envisage an extra 2,000 cars, a conservative estimate, all trying to get to the A12 and Witham Station at the same time.

So Langford Road and Broadstreet Green will be a miniature M25.

Then of course the social and environmental problems of the increase in population by 2,500-plus.

Hardly a garden suburb is it?

To summarise this whole “national”

problem, for that is what it is, and its effect on our once green and pleasant land, I am sadly reminded of Alexander Cordell’s classic book the Rape of the Fair Country which describes what the industrial revolution in the 1800s did to a beautiful rural South Wales.

If some people decide to read it then at least this letter will have achieved something.

Robert J S Long MBE, Former Maldon District Council chairman