HERE is a selection of this week’s letters.

‘Stourport’s Bridge Street is a shortsighted plan’

I WRITE regarding the Bridge Street site in Stourport.

This has been used as a car park for some time and has served the local businesses well, allowing them to continue their evening trading in restaurants and takeaways.

Boarding up this car park has seriously affected their trade and eventual profitability and will mean more premises shutting their doors and making Stourport a ghost town.

I cannot see how selling this site to a contractor will do anything but make crossing the bridge into the shopping area and working area slower than it already is, as with using it for house/flats etc will mean more street parking.

It is a very shortsighted plan, although I am aware the council is strapped for cash, but the only thing that would bring a benefit to the town is for the council to make this a chargeable car park, not a private one – that will bring cash into their coffers and help to save the town.

There could be a restriction on the length of stay to prevent overstays and a small charge for up to one hour, making it accessible to the poor amongst us and I am sure this would be most welcome to all businesses in Stourport and may increase the use of some of the derelict and unused shops there at the moment.

It would be a good idea to put this out to your community as there may be other ideas for you to consider.

Diane Ashby

Stourport

‘Housing targets are putting greed over green’

YES, housing targets are certainly too high, too fast for the UK.

The current approach is geared towards financial gain, rather than housing needs with large developers winning out at the cost of green fields, producing many car-dependent, unaffordable homes.

They are eating up our valuable rural spaces at a time when we need productive land and green belts more than ever.

Cash-strapped councils will happily go along with this, of course – more homes equal more council tax.

But also, planning committees are frightened of incurring huge appeal costs if they turn down large scale planning applications.

Towards the end of last year, Wyre Forest District Council approved the Woven Oaks development of at least 1,450 dwellings (the Local Plan having effectively removed all of Kidderminster’s greenbelt to the east of the town).

Their decision ignored, not only the voices and wellbeing of hundreds of local people, but also an independent highways report which highlighted major traffic and safety concerns.

Furthermore, planning is too easily granted for green spaces when alternatives are available.

All over the country, small communities are being swamped by vast developments which are being bolted on to already over-worked services and insufficient road systems – sometimes doubling the number of dwellings without the infrastructure to support them.

The Council for the Preservation of Rural England estimates there is enough brownfield land available to accommodate a large proportion of the government’s 1.5million new homes target and almost half of that already has planning permission (source: CPRE).

According to its own figures, Wyre Forest District Council actually over-delivered on housing in the period 2020/21 to 2022/23, providing almost double the required number with thousands more in the pipeline.

There comes a point where local government needs to stand up and say it has supplied enough new homes and has reached saturation levels at the present time.

And if the current target is 1.5million, how many will be demanded for the next decade and the decade after that?

It’s time the Government thought about the long term survival of our environment over short term gain.

Richard Maskery

Kidderminster

Help to find volunteers

ACROSS the country, charities are working tirelessly to support their communities, and often, volunteers are at the heart of that effort.

Readers who are part of charities will know how tough it’s become to find the volunteers that we need.

It’s not the willingness isn’t there, we hear every day from people who want to help. It’s just that life is busy, the process can be clunky, and too often, the right opportunities and the right people simply don’t find each other.

Thanks to the support of players of People’s Postcode Lottery, Royal Voluntary Service is developing a free-to-use digital volunteering platform to support charities with recruiting and onboarding volunteers.

It’s been designed with input from local and national charities to help all of us connect with volunteers from all generations and backgrounds and aims to complement all the existing good work taking place to recruit volunteers at a local level and in specialist areas.

The platform will officially open to the public in the autumn, when local people will be able to browse volunteering opportunities and click and connect with causes they care about.

Today, I’m writing to encourage fellow charities to sign up for free and see how the platform could benefit them.

Whether your cause is health, heritage, sport, animals, the environment – or something beautifully unique to your community – we want you with us.

This platform is our chance, together, to make volunteering easier, more accessible and more visible.

Whether someone has an hour to give or wants to commit long-term, we want them to find a role that fits – something they believe in, something local, or something flexible they can do from home.

Visit: royalvoluntaryservice.org.uk to find out more and sign your charity up to the platform.

Catherine Johnstone CBE,

Chief Executive of Royal Voluntary Service

EDITOR’S COMMENT

BIRCHEN Coppice receiving £20million investment over the next ten years is great news.

And the fact those living in the area will decide where the cash is spent is just as important.

This is a massive opportunity for transformative change to an area forgotten for far too long.

It is now crucial that people and groups in and around Birchen Coppice have their say to ensure the funding goes to the right place to make the most difference and build a

better future for all in the community.