Hundreds oppose plans for new Forest of Dean town

Residents opposed to plans to build 3,500 homes have called on their local council to drop the plans.

About 200 people attended a meeting at Redmarley Village Hall in the Forest of Dean to discuss plans for a new town at Glynchbrook, near the villages of Redmarley D'Abitot, Lowbands, and Pendock.

The Government has set the Forest of Dean District Council a target of building 13,000 new homes by 2045.

Protesters say the new settlement, close to the Ledbury junction of the M50, would cause irreparable damage to the local area and the district as a whole.

There were so many attendees at the meeting that the crowd spilled out into the corridors and car park of the village hall, according to the Local Democracy Reporting Service.

Phil Waring, a Lowbands resident, said: "Everyone here recognises the need for new homes and we applaud the council for doing everything it can to meet its housing targets.

"But delivering high-quality new homes can't become a box-ticking exercise.

"You can't build homes on a floodplain, in the middle of nowhere, and say you've solved the housing problem."

Concerns were also raised during the meeting about the inability of roads to cope with the estimated increased traffic.

Council leader Adrian Birch said the authority had already written to the government to challenge the housing target it had been set.

"We therefore need to put forward a local plan that gives greater control over where and how new development happens," he said.

"Without an approved plan, decisions would be driven by national policy alone and largely led by developers, leaving us with little influence over where growth takes place."

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