Gateway protest looks bleak

In my opinion, and many others, this application is a preliminary to another application - to enlarge Coventry Airport. We all know that the Coventry Local Enterprise Partnership strongly supports this application. We all know that Coventry Airport is owned by Sir Peter Rigby. We all know that Sir Peter Rigby is chairman of the Coventry Local Enterprise Partnership. We all know that the Warwick District Council strongly supports this application. We all know that much of the application site is owned by Coventry City Council and if this application is passed the land will be worth many times its present value.

We all know that if this application is passed the village of Baginton will be overrun with new buildings and lose its identity, that the village of Bubbenhall will lose a good deal of neighbouring countryside, and that Rock Farm, near Bubbenhall, will be obliterated, the farm house and buildings destroyed and the owner forced to leave.

We all know that the application site is green belt land, which is protected by planning policy and should be inviolate, and that the “very special circumstance” for setting this protection aside, the promise of 14,000 new jobs, reduced to 10,000 and then 6,360, is pure and utter humbug for there are many empty sites in the vicinity that could accommodate the proposed logistics park and technology park so there is not the slightest need for them.

Finally, we all know that not only is there scarcely a resident of Baginton, Bubbenhall, Stoneleigh or the surrounding area, who wants this application to succeed, but that it is, and with excellent reason, heartily detested.

Yet the outlook for June 12 is bleak. At the first hearing the planning committee was evenly divided. Since then the chairman, Cllr Illingworth, and two other members who voted for refusal have been replaced, which is wrong, morally wrong, for as this application was deferred for further information it should be decided by the original team. Moreover, this “further information” is the GL Hearn report, due on March 4, but miraculously presented just in time for this cynical change of committee.

So it is very likely that this unspeakable, unthinkable application will be passed.

And what, as night follows day, happens next? Why the expansion of Coventry Airport, of course.

Nicholas Butler, East Street, Long Compton