.Rectory Road is full of Victorian housing that clearly didn’t include the need for on road parking in its design making this a largely single lane road.

I drive my kids to school because I won’t have them cross the B1150 to walk to school on Rectory Road themselves due to the ridiculous volume of traffic that the NDR now delivers to our villages of Horstead and Coltishall (it was bad enough before the NDR). Accompanying the children on foot to and from school every day would take 2 hours out of my working day which I cannot afford to give. So we drive to School and park in the village hall car park when it’s not full, or the football pitch car park - when it’s not full and then on the road as a last resort - it’s mayhem. There aren’t enough parking facilities around the St Johns Close / Rectory Road area to accommodate all the users at the moment without significant personal risk, never mind adding to the problem by introducing more road and pavement users; the roads are narrow, the pavements are narrow (often walking two side by side because there are a number of children between the ages of 2-5 that need to hold their parents hand at the St John cross point in a bid to keep safe).

This housing expansion on Rectory Road cannot be passed in all good conscience unless these matters are addressed so that the safety of 200+ children of the primary school, 30+ users of the preschool, vulnerable users of the doctors surgery and existing home dwellers in Rectory Road are not subjected to increased risk to their personal safety on a daily basis.

Profit should not be prioritised over the health and safety of people. The people promoting this development are interested in making money, not solving the areas housing expansion needs. Let’s build more houses (and fund extensions to the school and doctors surgery to better accommodate the increasing local population), but do so in safe places with some element of future proofing, not in areas that have already outgrown any future-proofing that may have been put in place when they were built 20+ years ago.

I put it to you that the councillors as public servants have a duty to ensure no such development is passed without due consideration to the benefit and safety of the current users and dwellers of this area. That they should be so confident in their conviction that the motion passed will not compromise the safety of the current users of this area to the extent that they would be personally accountable should they be proved wrong. That is a conviction I would trust and is not one that I would undertake based on the current proposal.