Representation by James Barry
- Date submitted
- 14 July 2023
- Submitted by
- Members of the public/businesses
This application is essentially an abuse of process, seeking to obtain hundreds of millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money to fund the completely unnecessary relocation of a perfectly well-functioning (and recently upgraded) sewage works to green belt land in order make a killing by redeveloping the existing brownfield site. The environmental impact will be enormous. Monstrous amounts of concrete will be required for construction, and the cost of decommissioning the old site has apparently not even been considered. The traffic implications hardly bear thinking about. The proposed access route via A14 junction 34 is completely inappropriate.The junction only has slip roads on one side, so half the site traffic would have to turn around at junctions 33 and 35, causing additional congestion. Even after the construction phase, there would be large numbers of “sludge lorries” clogging up the roads for ever more. In comparison, the existing sewage works is located close to a major junction of the A14 with bidirectional access. The proposed site is on a chalk aquifer, highly unsuitable for a sewage works. The site structures cannot be sunk down on such land, resulting in ridiculously tall digester tanks etc.