Keep Church Fields Green Campaign



Church Fields at East Ardsley

 We are holding a public meeting in East Ardsley next Tuesday to get support for the MARC campaign to keep Church Fields in East Ardsley green. The Meeting will be held at the Conservative Club on Chapel Street East Ardsley on Tuesday 10th December at 7pm.

The meeting will discuss the application for 370 housing units on this greenfield site from Barratts the Builders and David Wilson Homes.

MARC oppose this development because local infrastructure cannot cope with this level of over development, This is because both the local primary and secondary schools are full with children already living within the area without any capacity to take the additional children this site will generate. Local children will therefor be unable to obtain a place at a local school. It is well known that the local health centre struggles to cope with the present demand on its services and the local roads - especially the A650 - already have large volumes of traffic using the system which only gets worse when the motorway network - the M1 or the M62 - are fouled up. Invariably traffic aiming to miss such congestion goes through East Ardsley and it is not as if that is a rare occurrence!

Church Fields is a greenfield site designated as a protected area of search but Labour Leeds City Council - along with its acquiescent Labour Councillors on Plans Panels - are happy to roll over and do the Developers bidding if such sites come up for development. Why they don't have more spine and refuse such applications when Labour Leeds City Council has already granted planning permission for over 20,000 housing units on mainly brownfield sites is a significant puzzle. Surely it is only reasonable for Developers to develop these sites before one blade of grass on a greenfield site is removed! That would seem logical but not to Labour Leeds City Council!

We will of course be backing the local community with the campaign to protect this greenfield site. I suspect their present local Labour Councillors will be as feeble as they were when considering the LDF (all three voted for the LDF and its target of over 7,000 housing units across the greater Morley area). It will be interesting to see if they oppose the application. I suspect they will as there are votes in it and Labour can always be guaranteed to be flexible with its principles if they loose votes!

There is an e mail address that can be contacted for objections forms which is keepchurchfieldsgreen@hotmail.co.uk. I hope residents will back the campaign and complete as many objection forms as possible.

I'm expecting a vibrant meeting next Tuesday. I'm looking forward to getting on the campaign trail again!