I am writing in regard to the recent letters and articles in your paper which are the foretelling a major problem. This is the number of affordable housing in the area and the increasing power of money hungry developers to avoid their obligations to provide them.

With local authorities waving through planning permission after planning permission, abandoning their written rules, regulations and guidelines for how many affordable (by whose definition I wonder) homes must be built by developers or their excepting cash pay offs to let developers out of the agreements they made in order to win the original planning approval. We are certainly not going to have many, if any, affordable homes on the market any time soon.

Luckily, local residents can fight back against this insatiable need of developers to build on every square meter of land they can lay their hands on and make as much money as they can by any means possible without providing some benefits to the local community they invade in the form of affordable housing. Spirited and well-organized residents in Kings Langley did just that when they convinced Dacorum Borough Councils Development Committee to deny the building of 40 apartments in a conservation area. In Three Rivers District, concerned Leavesden residents and ward councillors where able to halt the building of 3, 2 story executive homes directly in front of the historic Leavesden Court building along College Road.

Thanks to Governmental changes in planning law and their forcing unobtainable quotas of new houses onto local authorities, the days of developers having to prove to local authorities and residents that their application to build will not be detrimental to the basic fabric of a neighbourhood are long gone. It is now up to the people who will live within eye sight of these money-making developments, which drain local services and resources, to do their research and challenge unwanted developments on the grounds of specific planning laws and environmental impact and not just moan because we don’t want it in our back yard.

M Thomas Brooks

Ovaltine Court, Kings Langley