Email to Suffolk Coastal Councillors

Dear Councillors

New Thames Gateway Port To Rival Felixstowe

Further to my email yesterday (15 March) questioning the population basis of the Regional Spacial Strategy (RSS) and its derivative, the Local Development Framework (LDF), DP World have given the go-ahead for work to start today on the dredging necessary to accommodate the new ultra-large generation of container ships to and from the Far East.

The new container port is to be built at Thames Haven, Thurrock, Essex on a 1500 acre brown-field site plus additional reclaimed land, using the 23 billion cubic metres being dredged out of the Thames to make the necessary channel.  There appears to be a lot of enthusiasm and no opposition to this project, which includes a 60 trains a day freight terminal and doubling of the single track rail connection.  DP World claims it will remove 2000 lorries a day from our roads (many of which would be from the A14) by having more direct access to London and the South and West via the M25 (much of which is presently served from depots in the Midlands fed by Felixstowe and the A14).

Clearly this new port will be, as it is intended to be, a direct competitor to Felixstowe as Britain’s largest container port.  Hopefully Felixstowe will be able to hold on to the goods traffic actually needed in the Midlands and North as distinct from that currently transhipped to London and the South.

Plans are to complete the new port in 10 years’ time, i.e. in the same time frame as Felixstowe’s planned expansion.  However, at the very least this undermines the development assumptions about Felixstowe and surroundings implied by the RSS and LDF documents, and is surely another major reason for putting on hold on Thursday 18^th March the LDF plans for major new housing developments, as I urged in my letter yesterday.

UKIP’s national policies are addressed to the people of Suffolk Coastal constituency as much as they are to the rest of the United Kingdom, but as your UKIP candidate, living by choice in Suffolk, one of the most rural of English counties, I recognise there are issues in Suffolk Coastal for which our national policies have special relevance.

These include:

East coast defences

• A long-term programme (LTP) for defence against coastal erosion and inland river flooding. The coastal erosion protection programme is particularly relevant to the whole coastline from just north of Felixstowe right up to Wrentham, the north of the constituency.  The responsibility for our coasts and rivers will be transferred from Natural England to a section in DEFRA specifically charged with maintaining them.
• A permanent end to mass immigration and therefore a complete change to population growth projections. This is particularly relevant to Felixstowe and Martlesham areas of the constituency because the Local Development Framework plans for some 3,000 new homes are based essentially on a population growth projection of an additional nine million people in Britain by 2032, which in turn is based on assuming an additional 300,000 per year of net immigration indefinitely. UKIP is adamantly opposed to this flow of people into an already overcrowded country^[1] from the rest of the world.
• UKIP is also opposed to building large estates on green-belt land and will withdraw all planning “Guidance Notes” specifying minimum housing densities and maximum numbers of parking spaces.
• Removing schools from LEA control through the children’s voucher system of paying for them, will allow decisions to be taken by voucher holders (i.e. parents) on whether village schools in particular should be retained, or indeed re-opened, case by case.
• Rural Transport
• Secure Energy

Tracking Votes in Suffolk Coastal

The following table shows that at the last test of voters’ preferences in Suffolk Coastal (June 2009), UKIP came second after the Conservatives, beating the LibDems, the Greens and Labour in that order.

Footnotes

1. England is where the vast majority of immigration occurs and it is already the most densely populated major country in the world.