Protest over homes plan

Residents voiced their opposition to plans for 40 houses on land west of Church Marks Lane and 25 homes to the east of South Street.

Villagers asked Wealden senior planning officer Jaqueline Watson if the houses just some of the 3,300 new homes Wealden have to allocate for the district by 2011 could not be located elsewhere in the village.

David Pattenden asked: 'How long will Church Marks Lane residents have to put up with disruption? One, two, three years?

'Access to Church Marks Lane is bad enough as it is. Imagine if we build another 40 houses there. There will be an increase in traffic and an increase in danger for children. Surely you can see this is going to be a problem for the people of Church Marks Lane?'

A resident of South Street said: 'The residents are very concerned about the safety of by-pass junction. I've been nearly killed there about five times people just drive so fast. If we are had another development opposite that junction I can see a major disaster happening there.'

Disused

Parish chairman Malcolm Soane questioned whether the new houses could be built on disused land at the South Street business area. He said: 'When I first came onto this council I thought it was vital to keep business land. But there's no point in maintaining commercial land when there's no desire for it. Just how long does it have to remain empty before someone takes their head out of the sand and says "yes, this is an option"?. The whole thing's a nonsense.'

Mrs Watson said the district council fought hard against the Government's ruling that 3,300 homes should be built in Wealden. 'We did fight very hard but lost that argument,' she said. 'We have no alternative but to find the sites ourselves because, if we don't, the Government will intervene and find them on our behalf.'

She said that of the 80 villages considered across the district for extra housing, 50 per cent did not have 'anything nearly as good a public transport facility as East Hoathly'. She added that half of those villages did not have a primary school and two thirds did not have a shop. She said that East Hoathly was one of the top eight villages in the district for services.

Referring to the business area, she said: 'Once a business site is lost it's gone forever. If that site were lost, there would be no other obvious site to replace it in the village.'