Warehouses Where Houses and Fields Should Be
The Council should aim to have enough workplaces to provide jobs for its residents.
Employment in Basildon Borough is spread over retail, public service, light-industry, office, warehousing, self-employment, research and development and agriculture.
Our Green Belt provides the farmland that helps to feed us. There may be few farming jobs but they are threatened by the council’s plans. Some farms may no longer be viable if they lose the number of fields to housing and warehousing that are proposed in Basildon Council’s plans.
The rest of the Borough’s employment land is in the urban areas. This land provides jobs at different rates. There are 38 hectares of derelict or unused work land in the borough which provides no work. Giant warehousing gives the fewest jobs per square metre. Light-industry and retail is about four times better and office space provides about eight times more jobs per square metre than warehousing.
Under the Basildon 2031 Revised Preferred Option they want to provide 49 hectares of work land. 11 hectares more than is available. About half of that 49 hectares would be for warehousing. Currently, warehousing is 20% of the employment land in the Borough, not counting public service, self-employment or agriculture.
If, under the Basildon 2031 plan, they wanted to use 25% of the new employment land for warehousing there would be enough land in the urban areas that could accommodate all of the need for land for new jobs and leave at least a hectare over for our housing needs. If they replaced warehousing land with other work land, in order to provide the same number of jobs, they would only need between a quarter and an eighth as much land. If they kept the warehouse land use at the current proportion there would be fourteen hectares over. It would take 2-3 of those hectares to make up for the warehouse jobs we would have had. If they “only” allowed six hectares of land to be used for warehouses they would have the same number of jobs and about fifteen hectares more land available for housing in urban areas.
If we did not provide for any new warehouses, we could meet the employment needs of 17,000 new households and would have 18 to 21 hectares of land on brownfield sites that could be made available for housing. That could take 1-2,000 new houses; more than that if high or medium rise buildings were suitable for the area.
But there is not a need for the Borough to increase at that rate. We don’t need anything like 17,000 new dwelling places or the working space to go with it.
It is not as if warehouse work is the type of work that is especially desirable. We should aim to provide more interesting, rewarding, satisfying and worthwhile work. Warehousing produces very little low quality work. There is something else that warehousing produes: – please turn over.
Sheer Weight Of Traffic
The London Container Terminal and the new deep water container port in Tilbury are already operational. The London Distribution ParkX next to the port could be working by the end of 2014. This 28 hectare warehousing development will consist of nine huge warehouses for businesses to store goods which are being shipped in or out of the port. From there the freight will go out or be transported on to destinations across the UK.
Just as building roads generates traffic and building houses draws in people, so building warehouses draws in trucks and lorries. The more and larger the warehouses there are the larger and more lorries there will have to be on our roads.
Our Council’s plan is to provide 25 hectares of new warehousing land by 2031. This uses our Green Belt land in the least effective way for providing jobs and prevents urban and derelict sites from being re-used for housing.
This will bring more heavy goods vehicles to our borough. Some of these vehicles will go to, and come from, Chelmsford, Colchester and points north from there. The route from Basildon takes the juggernauts through Billericay’s High Street.
Our High Street is a conservation area with many historic listed buildings, it cannot be widened and the same goes for Stock. Vehicle crashes have already done some structural damage to our ancient buildings.
It won’t be safe for cyclists and Billericay pedestrians have been killed crossing the High Street on the pelican crossings.
X The word park is used here in the sense in car park rather than parks and gardens.
Be afraid, be very afraid.
The Basildon 2031 plans are wrong. This does not have to happen.
Be reasonable: demand the earth – to stand on. Join us and take action to change it.
For more go to www.BillericayActionGroup.org.uk Billericay Action Group 2014