Letter: Horrified about Leicestershire housing expansion

I simply do not believe that planners can know that residential developments totalling 100,000 homes – the size of Melton Mowbray, Hinckley, Market Harborough, Lutterworth, Oakham and Loughborough combined – are needed by 2031.

How are such statistics collated?

Where on earth are the people who need these homes living now?

Do they all live cheek by jowl with parents and relatives?

They certainly do not as our indigenous birth rate continues to fall quite dramatically.

Young people, presently aged about 12, who by 2031 could be the potential residents of such vast numbers of new homes, will have an incredible choice! Will they be able to afford such homes?

Will they buy or rent? What types of homes would be built.

I am suspicious that so called planners and developers work more for financial gain, hand in glove with Government, to make money.

In future years the environmental cost of such massive developments will be measured by fewer natural species in our remaining green spaces.

More human stresses will occur in the cramped rabbit-hutch human homes.

Roads will be starved of adequate repairs and maintenance. Hospitals and staffing levels will be continually in crisis. Schools and education provision will suffer as more tick box processes are introduced which masquerade as education.

The elderly and infirm will again be at the back of the queue.

What kind of land do planners and developers want?

Development should proceed with long term sensitivity uppermost. Profit and politics should have no place in the process.

Why do planners have the cheek to assume that we the people want or need such expansion?

People can exist in cramped conditions but this is not living.

Building more homes is a cause of problems just as much as it might bring very questionable improvements to an area.

Richard Billington, Foxton