Dear Editor,

The Ross Gazette reports that our councillors are always trying to get extra funds for our roads and that they will “keep battling for Ross”.  Recently a grant of £3m has been missed out on, apparently.

 They just don’t get it, do they? We have to stop thinking about increasing our housing stock, increasing our supermarkets, the population and roads. Yes they are needed but the way we live in this country, we simply don’t have sufficient resources to support it all. 

Who, amongst our councillors, is actually planning with sustainability in mind? It is all about growth, intensive farming, building on flood plains, cheap labour, cheap products from China and so on. It is time we all realised that a “cheap” lifestyle is destroying choice through small independent business being unable to compete with the conglomerates. 

It is destroying our habitat, our wildlife, our whole environment.  STOP and THINK!  When was the last time you asked your pension company whether they invest in fossil fuel firms which hugely contribute to climate change?  Or in wealthy house builders who buy up land and wait for the prices to go up before starting to build?  According to the Environment Agency 10,000 new homes are to be built on flood plains in England alone! Why?

We need to get off the merry-go-round of build more roads, more houses, more supermarkets, get cheaper and faster connectivity and start thinking about living “within our means”.

Why are we not investing in solar panels in some of our brown field sites (e.g. where Tesco was once planned) or even using the river for small scale generation instead of using the precious water to irrigate fields where crops would not normally grow?

Andrew Meek

Ross-on-Wye