• 15,000 New Houses & Flats on Green Site
• Massive Traffic Impact on South of Leicester
• Financial Burden on City for Decades

The government has again shortlisted the Co-op site to the South of Leicester for further

The Co-op wishes to take advantage of the Governments plans to allow new towns to be built by developing it's farmland South of Leicester for development. These plans will see 15,000 housing units being built in the area around Stoughton, the Strettons and Great Glen.

The impact on Leicester will be huge.

TRANSPORT

If the Co-op figures are correct 8,000 people will leave the town to go to work each day. There is no way that all of these will be travelling via public transport, and large amounts of traffic can be expected onto the A6 London Road and the ring road. In turn this will displace traffic onto surrounding residential streets, compounding problems shown to exist since the "A6 improvement scheme" (which has caused worsened problems on other roads).

The ring road will in effect become the motorway link road for the Co-op town. This will necessitate road widening wherever possible along the length of the road. Those parts of Knighton, Eyres Monsell and Aylestone to the South of the road will be increasingly cut off. The danger to children crossing the road to get to school, or to visit family and friends will increase. Pollution levels will increase due to congestion and higher traffic volumes.

Comments suggesting a tram could be built rely heavily on funding coming from the City and Government, in the region of hundreds of millions of pounds. Achieving a tram will be one of the most costly methods of achieving marginal (and questionable) improvements in transport over that which can be achieved by buses. The consequence will be to lumber Leicester with a legacy of debt.

Unanswered questions over Education and other services

There also remain other questions about how the Co-op town will impact upon other services in the City, most notably education.

The new town is planned to have 2 secondary schools. These will be within a few miles of existing city schools which are participating in the BSF project. This scheme has seen the city borrow £250m to rebuild all of Leicester's secondary schools. Should any of those schools fail to keep their pupil numbers at the level agreed with the private company that will run the schools there is a financial penalty, which will have the effect of reducing the funding available per pupil.

The loss of even more pupils to the County will undermine efforts to turn around performance of local schools in Leicester.

Other questions about infrastructure and services have still to be answered, with possible impacts on the health service in Leicester still to be fully scrutinised.