Protest planned in Cannock over plan to build 60 new homes
Furious residents are planning a protest in Cannock after developers resubmitted a plan to build an estate on green fields.
Bromford Housing wants to build 60 homes on Rawnsley Road despite similar applications being refused in November 2020 and 1999.
Rawnsley Councillor Claire Wilkinson has organised the protest to coincide with Cannock Chase Council's planning committee conducting a site visit at 1.30pm on Wednesday.
She told the Express and Star: "This application has been slipped onto the agenda at the last moment and residents were totally in the dark about these plans.
"The fields are an important ecological example of the wildlife and different grasses and plants which are native to Cannock Chase."
Councillor Wilkinson will be speaking at the planning committee meeting, which starts at 3pm at the council house, as part of the three minutes offered to those who object to the application.
She said: "The council have cut bus services to this part of Cannock as well as cutting other services back in the area but they now want to invite people to live here, it does not make sense.
"I do not want our landscape to change forever and everyone who I have spoken to feels the same."
A raft of objections were originally made against the application in 2020 and more than 25 local residents have objected again.
One resident's objection said: "Nothing over the past year or so that this has been hanging over the heads of this wonderful community has changed. All the original objections you will have received, certainly from myself, and others still remain. Nothing has changed. The school and doctors surgery haven’t suddenly grown overnight."
Bromford Housing says Cannock is in need of affordable housing and as well as the 60 homes a new public space will be created.
In a letter to Cannock Chase Council, Bromford Housing representatives said: "All 60 homes which will be developed on this site will be affordable units.
"This is an important point because the homes will be allocated to households who are already residents of Cannock; they will not all be new households to the area and a proportion are likely to already have access to the Hednesford Hills.
"Indeed, evidence suggest that there will be strong demand for the new homes from people who are already ‘local’ to the site."
