Somehow, the notion that the Tory and the Canvey Independent Councillors can conjure up the required spaces to build houses from brown field sites as suggested at the Oct 2011 Council Meeting, is just a pie in the sky.

If there was an abundance of brown field sites available, why on earth haven't they been identified during the six years it has taken to produce the very expensive, yet rejected, Core Strategy?

As far as I can see the only significantly sized sites that qualify as brown field in the Borough are the Charfleets and Manor Trading estates, both of which are not very pretty places.

The Council had the opportunity about three years ago, to consider a proposal from a developer, to build a new business park in the north west corner of the Borough, demolish the Manor Trading Estate and clean up the ground before building much needed homes..

There would no more heavy scrap-lorries causing havoc at Tarpots and Church Road.

Then good quality clean jobs could be created with access far away from housing.

Clearly the feasibility and the details would need  a great deal of consideration, but apart from a throw away rejection in the Core Strategy, this matter has not received anything like the proper consideration by Council and its officers.

This aborted exercise  is also another example of financial imprudence on the part of this Council. This fiasco has cost council tax payers a sum close to half a million pounds  It was inevitable that guerrilla attacks, by developers, on several parts of the green belt were bound to happen.  The latest being a proposal, it was reported, to build 250 houses at Jotman's Farm.
With the self-inflicted fiasco of the twice ill fated Local Development Framework (core strategy), the incompetence of the Tory controlled Castle Point Council, aided and abetted by the dysfunctional Canvey Island Independence Party, has placed all of the Borough's greenbelt at risk.
With the only protection of the greenbelt, being the 13 year old Local Plan, arranged and approved in 1998 by the then Labour administration, it is inevitable that developers now see our green belt as fair game.
The Tory councillors were warned by their planning officers of the possibility of these attacks, should delays in getting a strategy agreed, yet they dithered and twice prepared proposals, which if they had thought things through, could have known that they could not get these passed local residents.
They are now, lamely, asking residents to indentify "brown-field sites", presumably with a view to blaming residents when none is found.
What on earth have they been doing since before 2007, when they started on their £500,000 aborted Core Strategy projects.
Surely they could have indentified brown-field sites for themselves, if indeed, such sites ever existed.
A cynical person might well ask, was the situation of developers' forays the intended outcome?