Representation by Susan Garnor
- Date submitted
- 23 June 2023
- Submitted by
- Members of the public/businesses
I would like to start by saying that our family have lived in the local villages close to the proposed HNRFI site all of our lives and regard this area as being an extremely important piece of the beautiful English countryside and i consider Burbage Common and Woods to be an integral part of our local area. Burbage Common and Woods is a very special place and my family regularly visit there for exercise and to help maintain our mental wellbeing, this was especially so during the recent Covid 19 pandemic and lockdown. I would like to convey my extremely strong objection to this proposed project and to give the reasons why i do so. I feel that this project would have a significant impact on our local area in many different ways and it would be difficult for me to list them in order of priority as there are so many legitimate reasons why i feel that this project should not go ahead. Firstly, the building of such a large scale project would cause the vast destruction of farmland and irreparable damage to the many different species of wildlife and their natural habitats. The estimated 850,000 square metres of high bay storage and logistic warehousing would completely destroy the aesthetics of the local area, no amount of landscaping would detract from this monstrosity. It will also generate an increased amount of pollution, not just in the construction of the site but also in the estimated 10,000 HGV movements and 8,000 plus workers movements per day on our local roads and additional 2 trains per hour a day on the railway. I fail to see how our local infrastructure could possibly cope with all the added traffic that will be passing through the area and the surrounding villages as the roads are regularly congested now. I believe that the intention is to widen the B4669 Hinckley road through the village of Sapcote but i would be interested to see what then happens when the road reaches the chicane in the centre of the village by the Co-Op store, this would surely result in a bottle neck situation. As it stands at the moment, the M69/M1 junction gets chocked with traffic at rush hour as does the B4ll4 junction at the Mill on the Soar and this will only be exasperated if there were to be an accident on any of these roads or indeed the A5. I think that the intended building of the new link road from the M69 junction 2 to the B4668/A47 Leicester Road would do little to relieve this and would quite possibly contribute to further congestion in an already congested Hinckley especially if there were any diversions in place due to accidents or road works etc. I fail to see why we need a additional rail freight and warehousing site when there are already numerous sites of this nature close by.