– a few extracts from the community and organisations,

which they sent to the Council during the consultation period.

Sports England… This strategic site includes a number of sports facilities including a gymnastics centre / sports centre and playing fields… Paragraph 74 of the National Planning Policy Framework offers protection to these facilities and requires specific criteria to be met before they can be developed.

Lloyd Hattersley: Please do not let anyone build on this lovely green field. It is the only remaining one on this estate.

JM, Hyde: Over the past 25 years we have seen an explosion of traffic on the M67 and A57. I would definitely object to any more development in this area. We objected to Tesco, but got ridden over roughshod. Does this Council not listen to peoples opinion, only their own?

D Ollerenshaw, Mottram: we are disgusted with the poor communication about this matter. There was a time when the council would write to notify residents of future planning applications. We now have to rely on our Longdendale Community Group and are very thankful for them.

W+Y Kneen Bbm: We object to the proposal for Mottram M67 sites.

1. The proposal will make the bottleneck at the end of the M67 worse.
2. The result will increase air and noise pollution, which is already beyond reasonable levels.

E Connor Mottram [Extract] The traffic at the end of the M67/ Mottram roundabout is already the worst bottleneck in Gtr. Manchester.

With the high density housing in that location extra traffic could also make the Roe Cross/ main road from Mottram to Stalybridge a bottleneck.

Chapman Mottram

Mottram has a small scale industrial lot and there are often units for rent on here. If an industrial estate was to be built without a customer in mind, it might be a white elephant.

T.C. Mottram

TMBC have not taken into account the duty to co-operate with neighbouring authorities. Industrial development on the M67 site would inevitably create increased traffic flow in an area that is already very heavily congested. The resultant increase in emissions from further traffic congestion would argue against the suitability of proposing the site for industrial development

…“general” industrial developments can require storage and use of potentially hazardous materials such as flammable solvents and gas cylinders. There have been several well-documented incidents where fires involving such materials have caused damage to adjacent properties even where they have been kept in compliance with official guidance.

D O’Leary, Hattersley (page 299, Mottram M67): The Hattersley side of Mottram stands to lose practically all of its open green space to developers.

Friends of the Peak District/CPRE extract:

10. Use of the site would contravene Tameside saved UDP policy OL1 (Protection of the Green Belt) as no very special circumstances have been demonstrated for such inappropriate development, and OL4 (Protected Green Space) as none of the exceptions criteria would be met.

12. It should be noted that a similar proposal for development in the Green Belt at the M67 roundabout in Mottram was made in the first deposit draft replacement Tameside UDP in 2000 (Policy E 1(3) Strategic Employment Sites Mottram)5. The proposed site was withdrawn due to strong objections from the Government Office North West, the Highways Agency, local groups and residents. Their concerns included loss of Green Belt land without demonstration of exceptional circumstances, loss of wildlife habitats and open recreational space, traffic generation and adverse impacts on the M67/A57/A628 strategic route.

14. The existing environmental conditions of the area are poor largely due to the volume of road traffic and associated congestion, yet few measures have been implemented to address them. As presented in April/May 2010 LITS6 was flawed and would not alleviate the underlying cause of the conditions. It is therefore inappropriate to rely on LITS as the effective mitigation measure, as we explain more fully below.

Longdendale Integrated Transport Scheme

15. Development of the Mottram M67 Strategic Site appears to depend upon the Longdendale Integrated Transport Scheme, which is nowhere explained but described as a ‘challenge’ under the Longdendale spatial portrait in the Preferred Options. As proposed in 2009 the Longdendale Integrated Transport Scheme (LITS) would not alleviate the traffic congestion in Longdendale or in Glossopdale7. Consultation on the LITS failed to expose the cause of the local transport problems, which to date also appear to lack a robust evidence base on which to plan. The cause of the problems – too many local cars and through lorries on the trunk route – was not spelt out explicitly or analysed. Car commuting was not mentioned and car journeys were not broken down by journey length, destination or trip requirements. The word lorry or HGV did not appear in the LITS and potential solutions for dealing with HGVs – for example, an area weight restriction to force HGVs onto the motorway network around the Peak District, environmental levy on all through traffic, sustainable routeing, freight onto rail and local sourcing of goods – were not addressed.

16. Solutions in the LITS included influencing travel behaviour to encourage the use of alternatives to driving, improvements to bus and train services and complementary highway measures such as traffic calming, road safety measures, environmental weight restrictions and speed reductions, all of which the FPD supports. However, implementation of all these measures appeared to rely on a bypass of Mottram which would have a negative impact on the environment, people’s quality of life and their health, and undermine the majority of the LDF Core Strategy aims. Evidence prepared for the Highways Agency’s public inquiry in 2007 revealed that increasing road capacity and lifting a bottle neck along the M67/A57/A628 trunk route would lead to substantial increases in traffic across the wider Peak District that could not be controlled, and would undermine key environmental and social objectives. The most effective way to manage demand and reduce traffic would be to use the bottle neck, which has capped traffic growth in the area for the last 20 years, and implement sustainable travel measures and traffic restraint.

17. TMBC now needs to use a problem-orientated approach that generates a wide range of solutions focusing on low carbon, cost neutral, smarter choices and sustainable travel measures that could be implemented quickly and that avoid road building. This would meet the core planning principle of the NPPF (para 17 penultimate bullet) to ‘actively manage patterns of growth to make the fullest possible use of public transport, walking and cycling, and focus significant development in locations which are or can be made sustainable.’ The NPPF requires the transport system to give people a real choice about how they travel and encourages solutions which support reductions in greenhouse gas emissions and reduce congestion. Smarter use of technologies can reduce the need to travel (paras 29-30).

18. We therefore conclude that given (a) the overwhelming adverse impacts of development of the M67 Mottram site on the Green Belt, landscape, wildife, air quality, traffic, and local amenity, (b) the lack robust mitigation measures, and (c) the very limited employment opportunities the development would create this site should score negatively in the Sustainability Appraisal and should be deleted from the Preferred Options.