Knock-on Effects of Elsenham 'Eco-town'

11.40.43pm GMT Wed 7th Nov 2007

Uttlesford Conservatives are forging ahead with their poorly thought-out plan for a new town near Elsenham.

Cllr Susan Barker, Uttlesford's chair of environment, has been asked to explain the impact on secondary education of the Conservative-run council's preferred option for housing growth - the new town at Elsenham.

At various meetings council leader Jim Ketteridge put forward central government investment in new schools as a benefit of a new, single settlement in contrast with careful and sensitive dispersal of future housing around several parts of the district and the expansion of some existing schools.

It emerged last week that Essex County Council officers' preferred approach for secondary education, were the new town to get the go-ahead, would be to shut Mountfitchet Mathematics and Computing College in Stansted and relocate it in new and larger premises on the new development site. This would result in busloads of children being taken from Bishop's Stortford and Stansted area to the new college via narrow Grove Hill against the flow of people driving out of the new town to work.

Cllr Barker has been asked to confirm whether this likelihood was part of the thinking behind the September announcement and whether such implications for existing communities and travel to school (and work) patterns will be included in the next stage of consultation from end November. She has also been asked whether parents, students and local organisations will be invited to respond to the consultation.