Here’s a template that could be used to object to any major building projects. Para 2) would need to be revised to fit the exact proposal but any of the other three are probably applicable to most major residential applications. Just cut and paste, depending on your tastes. Or add your own objection to any or all of these.
I object to planning application [number] on the following grounds:
1) Unless the applicant can produce some credible evidence to prove that the proportions of future residents will reflect the current ethnic mix in Cornwall, the Council is in danger of breaching article 16 of the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities. This states that the ‘parties shall refrain from measures which alter the proportions of the population in areas inhabited by persons belonging to national minorities and are aimed at restricting the rights and freedoms flowing from the principles enshrined in the present framework Convention’.
2) The sequential test implies that any supermarket to the west of Truro should ideally abut the existing urban area. Building a supermarket and associated housing in open countryside several miles to the west of the town is an unacceptable encroachment upon the rural landscape.
3) The adverse impacts of this application, in terms of its effects on biodoversity and wildlife, encouragement of piecemeal ribbon development and suburbanisation, and pressure on infrastructure contravene paragraph 14 of the National Planning Policy Framework. This states that if adverse impacts ‘significantly and demonstrably’ outweigh the benefits, development cannot be ‘sustainable’. Because of the above adverse impacts, and as this proposal is likely to encourage the generation of excess demand over and above local needs and consequent migration to Cornwall, it cannot be said to be ‘sustainable’.
4) Further major residential applications, unless 100% affordable, should be subject to a temporary embargo until
i) the planning authority or the DCLG commissions an independent enquiry into the consistently and grotesquely exaggerated household and population projections for Cornwall that have been published by the ONS and DCLG since 2003. Existing metrics are clearly unfit for purpose.
ii) the impact of planning to increase the population of Cornwall by a minimum 95,000, (equivalent to around five greater Truros) over a 20 year period, an 18% growth that will bring the population up to around 625,000 by 2031, are reconciled with Cornwall County Council’s conclusion in 1976 that Cornwall’s ‘ideal population capacaity’, in order to maintain its ‘physical character’, was just 430,000.
Cornish studies resources 