Lynn News reader letters on flood tragedy, plans for The Wash, West Winch housing plan, climate change and breast cancer appeal
If something looks too good to be true...
The proposal for a barrage across the wash and associated container port is the most significant project to affect West Norfolk since Cornelius Vermuyden drained the Fens 400 years ago.
We should be wary of accepting bold claims of solving flooding around the Wash, the promise of employment, a new six mile beach and other suggested benefits.
Some of the questions which need to be answered are:
- Where would the barrange link to West Norfolk?
- Could the barrage lead to flooding in North Norfolk?
- How many jobs could be lost through loss of the Wash ports and fishing industry?
- How will property prices be negatively affected?
- How would the barrage impact on wildlife in the Wash?
- What new infrastructure would be required to accommodate all the new traffic?
- The developers are promoting a new Norfolk and Lincolnshire ‘Powerhouse’. What does this mean in reality?
My fear is that the project will gain momentum and therefore support from remote Government departments and ministers with decisions then taken out of local people’s and local authority’s hands.
It is of great concern that the developers have failed to properly engage with the community, businesses and conservation organisations of West Norfolk.
I don’t believe the scheme is viable or deliverable but during the process many people’s hopes will be raised only to be ultimately dashed.
In ten years’ time, when the Wash waders have gone, when even more traffic is clogging up local roads and when property prices in Heacham have crashed, I don’t want to be kicking myself for not asking searching questions now.
As the saying goes: “If something looks too good to be true, it probably is.”
Andy Bullen
Downham
We had only just got over the floods tragedy
Once again, another interesting Turnstone column from John Maiden. I can appreciate the solemnity he gave it.
I was living at 8 Willow Road at the time , and my father was a lorry driver with FW Shanks, and I can remember him coming home and telling me that someone had died at work. It was Mr Jarvis from 2Willow Road.
I was dumbstruck, once again, as it is relatively difficult to comprehend the death of someone who you actually know, because we had only just got over the floods, and I knew all the Papworth girls.
Barry M Norton
Ingoldmells, Lincs
Area fails the sustainability test for me
I spoke at the recent West Norfolk Council cabinet meeting and highlighted the planning inspector’ s concerns that the local plans put 40% of the houses into West Winch.
This increases reliance on the car and traffic on the roads, because West Winch has no railway station.
The inspector’s letter raises questions about the local plan’s sustainability.
The inspector also points out the borough council has not justified the extra 2,400 houses it has added into West Winch up to 2039 in the local plan in terms of highway network safety, ecology and local amenity.
In my opinion, the West Winch Growth Area fails the sustainability test.
Cllr Alexandra Kemp
County Division: Clenchwarton and King’s Lynn South
Take those rose tinted glasses off sharpish
The bitter irony of the recent breezily positive statement from (now departing) deputy CEO Laura Scaife-Knight claiming our Queen Elizabeth Hospital has gone from ‘basket case to bright future’, couldn’t have escaped anyone.
Surely, her statement, right in the middle of the unprecedently aggressive four-day strike by junior doctors, would suggest her words are merely ‘whistling in the dark’?
Whether all the other staff are happy is equally debatable as nurses have recently all withdrawn their labour, as have ambulance drivers.
Ms Scaife-Knight has found herself a job in Orkney and so, like chief executive Caroline Shaw, another supposedly ‘determined’ hospital executive, has abandoned this rapidly crumbling edifice.
With striking doctors, nurses, and ambulance drivers, over 3,000 props holding up the ceilings and six million people on national NHS waiting lists, I think Ms Scaife-Knight needs to ‘get real’ and take those rose-tinted glasses off sharpish as she dumps us and heads off to Orkney hospitals which aren’t falling over day by day, inch by inch!
Steve Mackinder
Denver
An ideology full of lies and deception
Kevin Holland wrote an impassioned letter in Viewpoint about climate change at a meeting hosted by Lynn Klimate Concern.
The rhetoric was there and the cliches with worn out arguments expounded, but there was commitment from all the participants. Kevin lamented that our national politicians didn’t have the same enthusiasm as in West Norfolk.
I would argue that their interests are there, not from conviction but self indulgence, in pursuit of expedient policy making.
The subject is regular in parliamentary debates and election hustings with egos jockeying for attention. The wealthy Davos Summit was testament to global warming being central to agendas and vanity projects. It was money which talked and not the weather, a dubious common goal.
The three main new world order religions are diversity, equality and climate change, with Greta Thunberg as a messiah, enthusiastically endorsed by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby. A real scientific method needs to be restored and the alarmist narrative broken. For rationale and accuracy I would invite Lynn Klimate Concern to study the findings of a two day scientific summit without preconceived ideas by the US think tank called Heathland Institute. The expertise gathered represented many hundreds of years investigating all aspects of the atmosphere. Not only were the false teachings of some scientists under the microscope, but the disastrous plunge into net zero catastrophe.
The event asked: “The True Crisis: Climate Change or Climate Policy?” It is the bottom line to an ideology full of lies and deception.
David Fleming
Downham
There’s no time to waste
Please believe me when I say diagnosing breast cancer early is SO important – and I am incredibly worried that the breast screening programme in England, which can save women’s lives from breast cancer, has been left to reach breaking point.
I ignored the small lump I found and ended up running the full gamut of treatment. The wonderful thing to say is that, 20 years on, I am here to tell the story but we know that’s not always the case.
Since the Covid pandemic started, nearly one million fewer women have had breast screening in England, resulting in thousands currently living undiagnosed.
At a parliamentary event held by Breast Cancer Now on International Women’s Day, I heard about the charity’s highly achievable blueprint that would transform the breast screening programme if the Government took it forward.
So please join me in doing what we women do best, standing with each other, by signing the charity’s #NoTimeToWaste petition now, to demand the Government invests in and takes urgent action to fix the breast screening programme.
Amanda Mealing
Breast Cancer Now Ambassador
