Kelly plan is anything but fair

Lynnette Kelly’s claims (‘Spreading the burden fairly’, Letters last week) that the answer to Warwick and Leamington people’s perfectly understandable concerns about new housing numbers is to dump the excess ‘up there’ on the edge of Coventry is neither workable, sustainable, nor, most especially, fair.

The proposed site, King’s Hill, sits within yards of one of the thinnest green belts in the West Midlands, the tiny Crackley Gap between Kenilworth and Coventry, and this whole area already faces massive turmoil and destruction from HS2. Construction traffic for King’s Hill would, unbelievably, actually share narrow roads with that for HS2.

Traffic to and from the regionally vital University of Warwick, which injects £222 million-a-year into the local economy, already snarls up the same B-rated Stoneleigh Road that 4,000-odd cars would disburse onto from Lynnette’s proposed King’s Hill mega-estate.

Construction of a new, dedicated A46 access point for the site would entail colossal delays and expense, on top of the Kenilworth bypass closures already scheduled during HS2 construction.

And there’s more - over 4,000 local people (from 1931 households canvassed) signed a petition against just 3,500 houses on this exact location when they were proposed in 2009. Their resistance is still extremely strong.

Oh and building here on this scale would overwhelm the beautiful Kenilworth Road, one of the most striking approaches to any city in the country.

But never mind. An election looms and Lynnette, prospective MP for Leamington and Warwick, thinks she has some good news for her voters.

I invite readers to consider the ensuing quota of house numbers in Warwick and Leamington if Coventry, or even Birmingham politicians were elected with similar ideas of ‘fairness’ i.e. ‘put them over there’.

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