Letter: Housing mitigation for Lymington should not happen on Isle of Wight

I recently noticed in your reports of a housing application in Lymington where the environmental mitigation by the developer was to buy land on the Isle of Wight.

This is totally wrong, any mitigation should be in the area where the damage will occur.

At Holbury Manor, now owned by the parish council, we have problems from housing estates built in the ‘90s where the stormwater run-off was piped into the manor site.

One of the problems is they have changed the ecology of the main pond, a designated Ancient Monument where the monks in the 14th century used to farm fish, and in the adjacent Warren Copse from the soakaways that leach out halfway down the copse.

More emphasis should be put on the ongoing effects by the planning authorities in considering planning applications. In recent years a new estate in Hythe was left empty for a few years because the builders did not comply with the drainage conditions, then tried to get away with it.

In parts of the country in the past few years there have been many cases of flooding which have been due to constant building upstream of old ancient waterways with quaint old bridges that were quite sufficient in those days to cope with the waterflow from water percolating through the ground.

But from the subsequent building of properties and roads the water run-off is immediate and has to go somewhere. This is a national problem and should be looked at by the government or else we will have more problems with the pending climate changes in the next 40 years.

The upshot of all of this is that land owners downstream of the excess water were penalised a few years later by HCC from when the problem arose, from the lack of forethought way back at the planning stages of the development.

Eddie Holtham

chair, Warren Copse and Holbury Manor Conservation Group