I'M Tim and I'm a NIMBY, and I've been dry for eight years... Well, only just. Last January the Calder burst its banks and came within five yards of my back gate.

For that is what I don't want in my back yard – the River Calder.

Sterne Mills is not in my back yard. It's at the far end of a field.
Well, I say a field, it often has a small lake and last January it was a river.

It's disconcerting to have a river the size of a field rushing towards your house. And watching whole trees float by at a fair lick.

Naturally we are concerned that this housing development will make matters worse (isn't it odd how housing development becomes regeneration and now transformation?)

I am also disconcerted by the overweening attitude of council officers who, in Coun Fekri's words, "act as the developers' cheerleaders" and seem to have lost the public servant aspect of their jobs; and the undue influence of Yorkshire Forward (and there's a naughty name, with the implication that anyone not in agreement with their plans is therefore backward – we're not stupid, y'know).

Ask some simple questions:

• Who asked for this housing?


• Who is in charge or responsible if things go wrong?


• Why so many workshop units, when the industrial land in Copley (now Copley Drive) could find no buyers for industrial use, and now has 55 houses on this site?

The amount of traffic "will not increase any more as a result of this housing development than it is going to anyway" (honest!)
Please explain on one side of A4 (that's a paper size, not a road).

Go on, I dare you...ask!

PS: We are not being nay-sayers. Please improve Sowerby Bridge, but we have several alternative plans for Sterne Mill and its environs which are ecological, educational and, yes, even industrial and residential.

T F Coleman