The latest News

25th January 2008

Congratulation to Amber Valley the planning section of the wen site is much improved and the comments we made before Christmas have been resolved - well done and thank you.

24th January - Morrison application granted!

Morrison granted permission to increase store size by 20%..

21st Dec 2007 - Amber Valley Planning WEB Site

Amber Valley are going to simplify the planning department site. In the very near future all the documents will presented as such and not as a long list of individual pages. So although it will take longer to download a document once you have you will have the full document, not one page from it. Further, they say they will shuffle the layout to make it more logical.

Good, thank you, I hope all the other changes are as helpfull.

Another View

10th November 2007 – The Belper Civic Forum have some nicely laid out and thought out leaflets that show some of the background on this subject. I'm not quite sure of the tenure of this body but they are a member of the Civic Trust. Judging by there output they clearly have access to official information and have funds to produce well produced leaflets.

It’s one of those leaflets that is of great interest in this case as I believe it distills the probable official position into something digestible. Have a read of The ‘Meadows Edge’ Category and dig down to the Belper at the Crossroads Leaflet, if you have not seen this yet it is well worth closer inspection and is not that far from my conclusions when I started this "My original ideas and opinions".

Remember the planning department even if they don’t like an application can only apply the rules as set out by government. Therefore, outlets like this one are very useful in the long term as they help us form an informed view.

Update

21st October 2007 - Update added pictures and made a few changes to other parts of the page. Some time soon I will update with a few pictures of the top end by the Triangle and try to show you how I think the road layout could be made simple in that area. This is getting too big to be one page so I will also look to break it down into several pages allowing more detail to be added to the individual sections.

BATS and the Labour Party

27th October - Update

I almost took this as a joke it is so bad but one arrived through my front door today and they seem to be delivering one to everybody in Belper. Personaly I think it is - bad, very bad and so amature, clearly biased and what has which partly you support got to do with the question? Come on Labour party why and what are you up to? Give me an answer and if I can I will publish it.

14th October 2007

Hu! I don’t know who is worse the Labour Party for the original survey or BATS for there "balanced considered" reply. At least I think the BATS response was largely "tongue in cheek", any way, go have a look and form your own opinion. Sorry, because of the way the BATS site is structured you many need to hunt for the posting. If so simply do a search for "A VERY IMPORTANT SURVEY".

PS I thought politicians were meant to reflect local opinion, which is clearly spit, and be neutral until they can clearly do so or am I just a little nieve?

So it has started

Update: This a picture of part of the lower end of Derwent Street the right hand half of the picture is the Ice-cream Factory and it has been cleaned up and boarded up since the publicity resulting from the Labour party "survey".

12th October 2007

Tescos have applied to have part of the old Thorntons site demolished and cleared. Sadly unless you are very patient and can be bothered to hunt hard you will miss it. Try the following list of steps, sorry but I have not found an easier way

• Go to the Planning Application Register page of the Amber Valley Web Site
• Enter "AVA/2007/1232" into the Application Number field
• Click on the Lookup button (Don’t hit return/enter that just reloads the current page)
• Scroll down until you see the entry and click on the Orange reference number
• The supporting document can be found via the menu below the "Return to List" Button.

So this is, to my knowledge, the first application quietly hidden behind the Thorntons name. Although I don’t think anybody can object to this building being demolished it saddens me that it is hidden behind the Thorntons name and not publicised as being on behalf of Tesco.

I am sorry but despite all the Open Government promises it is difficult to find and access the documents on Government web sites at any level. It must cost a fortune as many government employees are expected to use these sites but even they cannot find the documents, sometimes even knowing the document title does not help.