Anger at rail freight resubmission plan

Anne Main has reacted angrily to today's news that Helioslough could be planning to resubmit its application for the Radlett Railfreight site.

Anne Main, MP for St Albans, has reacted angrily to today's news that Helioslough could be planning to resubmit its application for the Radlett Railfreight site.

The company has submitted an environmental scoping report to St Albans City and District Council and has confirmed that a new planning application will follow.

Anne said:

"This is outrageous. The last planning appeal was only thrown out by the Secretary of State a few weeks ago and now we face the prospect that we could be about to become embroiled in a further expensive fight. Any resubmission would place Park Street residents and St Albans as a whole under a huge amount of stress once again.

It is obscene that the developer is allowed to nonchalantly decide that it will submit again for the same site so soon after the refusal. The last fight cost our council a huge amount of money and this announcement will beggar the St Albans taxpayers, whose council tax bills are already high enough.

The reason for this resubmission is essentially the developer's failure to submit adequate plans the first time around. If they had submitted an adequate site assessment to begin with then we wouldn't be in this situation now.

This is the wrong economic climate to be putting forward this plan once again, and this reeks of the developer trying to force through a plan in a community that is tired of fighting. The developer is clearly trying to get this plan approved before other, more appropriate, sites are found. I have already spoken to STRIFE and we have agreed that we will continue to fight this proposal all the way.""