St Matthews green spaces being 'blitzed' out of existence by Sir Peter Soulsby and LCC
Today on Remembrance Day 11th November 2019, St. Matthews Estate is having almost every bush and small tree removed under a 'tidy-up blitz'. We are being subject to this 'blitz' over the next six weeks, and I dread to think how bad things will be by then.
St Matthews lies between 3 major roads and has a problem specifically identified in the LCC AQAP (Air Quality Action Plan) as having high levels of NO2 from this traffic.
This Mayor's initiative has been undertaken with no local consultation and has just been imposed on us by the same people who have been building illegal car parking (no existing planning permission for Kashmir Rd) on the estate. I wonder if there is some collusion between the contractors and the Mayors office. Spending £330,000 on 24 spaces seems to have been a way of funneling money to the Council Highways dept. (and it was only 1 of 3 car parks) Surely it cant cost over £10,000 per space to convert what was already a temporary car park into a permanent car park. Parking problems could easily be solved by introducing some regulation. At the moment St Matthews is providing 'free' parking , yes that's right, free parking for people to walk to town. Except, it's not free, we are paying for it, with our children's health.
Would you rather your children played in an environment with trees and bushes or a car park? Its a simple choice!
Once the bushes are cut down, the next line is, there is nothing there!
Lets tarmac it for easy maintenance.
A large amount of bushes, a couple of months were removed from the estate on the grounds rats were living in them. As everyone knows rats like urbanised environments a lot more then trees and bushes, they live primarily in storm drains and burrows. Will a study be made to see if the rat population fell because the bushes were cut down? I doubt it. Did anybody count the rats to begin with? Do foxes keep the rat population down? We used to have a few here on the estate although I haven't seen any for about a year. Is any of this stuff they do evidence based?
The last major and only ongoing consultation going on in the St Matthews is being done by the St Matthews Big Local and it states that people want an estate that is clean and green. Clean and Green are not incompatible things. Plastic grass might be 'clean' (in however a way lots of chopped up plastic bags dyed green, and stuck to the ground can be considered clean.) but it is not green. Green is not just a colour, it means not spraying our children with glyphosate when they are playing in the street. (On the packet it says do not enter the area for 4 hours. Where is the warning to the public for their children and pets.) We have 2 groups of sparrows living on our estate and they have been there for 20 years that I know of. They live in the same small patches all year round, if those bushes are cut down then they have nowhere left to go. Are we allowing the LCC to deprive our children of any contact with nature, however small.
When I came on this estate there were bats, hedgehogs, frogs,sparrowhawks, etc etc now one feels lucky if you see an earwig. The natural environment on the estate has been systematically degraded, Compare google satellite maps of the estate now and from before and see that over 50% of the trees and bushes have been removed in ten years.
This year children on the estate planted fruit trees in various locations , most have been cut down in our current 'tidying' up phase. The removal of the last vestiges of green on the estate is not maintenance, it is destruction, and it is harmful to the health of our children.
I am being stonewalled in trying to find out what the policy is, and the strategy being applied to this destruction and why do they think they need to do this to us. I wonder would Sir Peter like if we went around to the leafy suburb he lives in and chopped everything to the ground without consulting him.
We have so little green here on this estate as it is and this is the final straw. If the green around my flat is removed ostensibly to paint the railings, I will be removing the railings on the grounds they are bad for my health and I'm sure I will be joined by the many other people on the estate who feel the same.
Please ask your local representatives for some clarification on this. If you find anything out please post it in the comments section below.
ps Talking to Jean does not equal local consultation. We know that she doesn't even have the money for postage or printing to run a consultation. Never mind the fact she is far to busy dealing with tenants problems the council itself should be dealing with. We all know Jean would need help to do run consultations that would stand up to any scrutiny. Some of the £6 million that LCC takes off this estate every year could be used to have consultations and give proper funding to Jean and the tenants association.
ps. It might seem that I am being hard on Sir Peter but I am being told that these 'works' are coming from him. It could be that I am misinformed and Sir Peter would be shocked when he sees the state of things wrought by his 'officers' on the children of St Matthews.
Cllr Hanif Aqbany: 0116 454 6360 Hanif.Aqbany@leicester.gov.uk
Cllr Mohammed Dawood: info@stmta.org
Jean Williams: St Matthews Tenants Association
Sir Peter Soulsby: Peter.Soulsby@leicester.gov.uk
4/12/2019 We are having great success with our petition. Please fill it in here https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScfWbH6WFK5c_4M74qWGNRhgDaSXajU0EvdTTYv2N8zpQnknw/viewform?usp=sf_link
St Matthews lies between 3 major roads and has a problem specifically identified in the LCC AQAP (Air Quality Action Plan) as having high levels of NO2 from this traffic.
This Mayor's initiative has been undertaken with no local consultation and has just been imposed on us by the same people who have been building illegal car parking (no existing planning permission for Kashmir Rd) on the estate. I wonder if there is some collusion between the contractors and the Mayors office. Spending £330,000 on 24 spaces seems to have been a way of funneling money to the Council Highways dept. (and it was only 1 of 3 car parks) Surely it cant cost over £10,000 per space to convert what was already a temporary car park into a permanent car park. Parking problems could easily be solved by introducing some regulation. At the moment St Matthews is providing 'free' parking , yes that's right, free parking for people to walk to town. Except, it's not free, we are paying for it, with our children's health.
Would you rather your children played in an environment with trees and bushes or a car park? Its a simple choice!
Once the bushes are cut down, the next line is, there is nothing there!
Lets tarmac it for easy maintenance.
A large amount of bushes, a couple of months were removed from the estate on the grounds rats were living in them. As everyone knows rats like urbanised environments a lot more then trees and bushes, they live primarily in storm drains and burrows. Will a study be made to see if the rat population fell because the bushes were cut down? I doubt it. Did anybody count the rats to begin with? Do foxes keep the rat population down? We used to have a few here on the estate although I haven't seen any for about a year. Is any of this stuff they do evidence based?
The last major and only ongoing consultation going on in the St Matthews is being done by the St Matthews Big Local and it states that people want an estate that is clean and green. Clean and Green are not incompatible things. Plastic grass might be 'clean' (in however a way lots of chopped up plastic bags dyed green, and stuck to the ground can be considered clean.) but it is not green. Green is not just a colour, it means not spraying our children with glyphosate when they are playing in the street. (On the packet it says do not enter the area for 4 hours. Where is the warning to the public for their children and pets.) We have 2 groups of sparrows living on our estate and they have been there for 20 years that I know of. They live in the same small patches all year round, if those bushes are cut down then they have nowhere left to go. Are we allowing the LCC to deprive our children of any contact with nature, however small.
When I came on this estate there were bats, hedgehogs, frogs,sparrowhawks, etc etc now one feels lucky if you see an earwig. The natural environment on the estate has been systematically degraded, Compare google satellite maps of the estate now and from before and see that over 50% of the trees and bushes have been removed in ten years.
This year children on the estate planted fruit trees in various locations , most have been cut down in our current 'tidying' up phase. The removal of the last vestiges of green on the estate is not maintenance, it is destruction, and it is harmful to the health of our children.
I am being stonewalled in trying to find out what the policy is, and the strategy being applied to this destruction and why do they think they need to do this to us. I wonder would Sir Peter like if we went around to the leafy suburb he lives in and chopped everything to the ground without consulting him.
We have so little green here on this estate as it is and this is the final straw. If the green around my flat is removed ostensibly to paint the railings, I will be removing the railings on the grounds they are bad for my health and I'm sure I will be joined by the many other people on the estate who feel the same.
Please ask your local representatives for some clarification on this. If you find anything out please post it in the comments section below.
ps. It might seem that I am being hard on Sir Peter but I am being told that these 'works' are coming from him. It could be that I am misinformed and Sir Peter would be shocked when he sees the state of things wrought by his 'officers' on the children of St Matthews.
Cllr Hanif Aqbany: 0116 454 6360 Hanif.Aqbany@leicester.gov.uk
Cllr Mohammed Dawood: info@stmta.org
Jean Williams: St Matthews Tenants Association
Sir Peter Soulsby: Peter.Soulsby@leicester.gov.uk
4/12/2019 We are having great success with our petition. Please fill it in here https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScfWbH6WFK5c_4M74qWGNRhgDaSXajU0EvdTTYv2N8zpQnknw/viewform?usp=sf_link
Comments