Give the north a chance to take stock

Those who worry that more than a thousand homes are earmarked for the already overcrowded north are told to relax: despite the huge number of permissions few developers are building.

One look at the latest planning framework to win approval, Le Four Banal, off Route Militaire, and you can see why.

A one-hectare plot with poor access knitted together from the gardens of seven different homeowners is hardly the stuff of builders’ dreams.

Throw in a flood plain risk and the chances of the 35-home site ever coming to fruition are negligible.

They certainly are if Mac Hamel, the 77-year-old owner of one of the properties, has his way. ‘Not while I’m alive,’ he says.

He has lived in the area for three decades and condemns the overdevelopment encouraged by the Island Development Plan.

Nor is the Vale douzaine impressed. The Development & Planning Authority might be relaxed about the potential impact of a total of more than 1,500 new homes in the northern development corridor but those who can see the daily impact of each development on traffic junctions, the school and the increasingly ‘busy’ feel of Vale and St Sampson’s are less sanguine.

What is the point of worrying Mr Hamel and the other six residents near Le Four Banal?

The DPA says it wants to make sure that no one tries to develop the area piecemeal. It must be a single plot for maximum efficiency.

But where is the urgency? Why disturb the good people of Route Militaire for a development that has almost zero chance of coming off?

The DPA has already made available scores of other plots through planning frameworks. Most of those would be easier to develop than Le Four Banal.

And by the time they are built upon and the residents moved in we might better understand what strain the roads and schooling infrastructure are under.

The whole project smacks of the States making work for the sake of it.

Let this be the last planning framework in the north for some time. The parishes need to take stock.