I recently wrote about my alarm at the Liberal Democrats’ transport policy, as revealed in their final draft local plan, and I am very pleased that Cllr Sharp has responded on these pages.

While I agree with his comment that both county and borough do indeed share similar ambitions, I cannot understand his remark that the difference in target dates are as he put it “hardly a big deal”.

Only the Lib Dem-controlled Borough of Watford has announced a climate change emergency and brought forward the deadline to be carbon neutral by 2030. The Government and EU are aiming for 2050. A 20-year difference is a very big deal to most people!

I must thank Cllr Sharp for his comment concerning the Government’s tripling of housing targets, as this was another alarming feature of the Liberal Democrats’ local plan.

Could he please explain why the developments at the Range and Ascot Road have been approved by his administration ?

Yes, the targets for housing have been raised to 780 per year, however the Government did not say to go and build outrageously tall buildings in unsuitable locations as an easy answer to a complex problem.

Do we really need to build a 1,214-dwelling, 28-storey mega high-rise in what is an already high density part of town?

That combined with Ascot Road’s 691 flats and Sydney Road’s 600 flats, totals 2,505 new builds. That’s over three years’ housing targets ticked off without taking into consideration all the many other projects that are in development.

Conveniently, the climate change emergency encourages such intense, “car light/low parking spaces” high-rise buildings.

If the Range planning application had been pursued with parking for every flat instead of only 200, then Highways would never have allowed this concentration of extra traffic into such an overdeveloped area.

The reality is that people drive cars, they need cars to get to work, to shop and to enjoy the freedom that cars provide.

It’s not going to surprise anyone when the majority of the new residents move in with a car or two that they have parked in any side street space they have found for miles around.

The High Street and retail area within the ring road are suffering terribly. It’s a horrible fact that the pandemic has accelerated the area’s slow decline into a rush of closures.

Surely now is the time to focus on the repurposing of this part of town. Here is the place to reimagine existing buildings, to maximise the potential of a mixture of shops and dwellings, to invest and to help the beleaguered shop owners. This is where we should have started. It’s even highlighted in their own commissioned tall buildings study, where the preferred recommendation is to raise the existing High Street four storeys to five at the front and eight at the rear without any significant impact.

However, that would have taken time, imagination and a great deal more effort than building a couple of extremely tall buildings that will blight the town for generations.

Interestingly, the same study concludes that there is a potential for an extra 5,330 dwellings above the local plan estimates. It seems there is room for some flexibility about what is built and where.

The Range development will be 28 storeys, to get a perspective of scale, that’s ten storeys higher than the Meriden flats!

Having lived and worked in this town since 1959, I am comfortable to shout out that I really am “angry of Watford”, so no Mr Sharpe I may have my political views but this is beyond politics, I have just had enough!

Ian Fox

By email