I am pleased that this version of the plan is an improvement on the 2019 version and I thank the council for listening to the comments made by the public on that document. However I remain disappointed with the lack of attention to detail in the 2021 Plan. The contents list is not correct; for example section 7.1 is at page 83, not 63. If you cannot even get this right, it undermines the credibility of the whole document.

The plan is unsound because it does not take account of climate change. I can see this because none of the documents in your evidence base explicitly refer to climate change. Climate change needs to be taken into account in the way we build and heat our homes, in their location to avoid hazards such as flooding and to make access to work and services most efficient. It needs to be considered in the roads, cycleways and walkways that we use to travel to work, schools, hospitals and other local services. It needs to be considered in planning an integrated public transport network that will reduce dependence on private cars. Our entire surrounding environment should be planned to promote sustainability of our lifestyle, including encouraging wildlife and access to green spaces. None of this has been considered explicitly in your plan. You altered the 2019 plan substantially when you took account of revised growth forecasts following Brexit. It seems to me highly likely you would alter this Plan significantly again if you were to take into account climate change.

My specific following comments will relate to the South East Hub Extension, as this is the area of the town with which I am most familiar.

The proposal for the development of the South East extension has simply not been thought through properly. New houses in the proposed locations will be attractive to commuters to other places, as they will only have severely congested access to Warrington through the already overcrowded A49. It is not credible to claim that low-cost starter housing will be built in these prime commuter locations and, if it were, the owners would have severe difficulty accessing the community services they need in Warrington. This is because there is no public transport improvement and no road network improvement planned to improve the already overcrowded routes into the town centre.

South Warrington is strongly impacted by the presence of three significant waterways running right through it; the river Mersey, the Manchester Ship canal and the Bridgewater canal. Travel around the area has always been, and will always be, dominated by the need to cross these waterways. The number of crossings is necessarily limited and, as any Resident will tell you, the roads are already congested in normal times and are gridlocked on occasions when traffic problems occur on one or more of the surrounding motorways. There are no new waterway crossings relevant to the South East Extension, or indeed any other significant north-south transport initiative, envisaged in this Plan. In fact, to add any new crossings will be extremely expensive, if it is even feasible, because of the existing extensive housing in the area.

The planned development along Stockton Lane is to my mind the most glaring evidence that the transport needs of the south east extension have not been thought through. The housing area south of Stockton Lane is surrounded by the Bridgewater canal to the north, Lumb Brook Lane to the west and Broad Lane to the east. The latter two country roads are totally unsuitable to take further traffic from new housing in this area and, as noted above, this would simply lead traffic south out of town. It is implausible to suggest that any acceptable additional crossing of the Bridgewater canal can be built to serve this area, as all of the southern bank of the canal is dedicated to playing fields. Any traffic which does venture north via Stanney Lunt Bridge or Lumb Brook Lane will increase the congestion at the dilapidated crossings of the Ship canal. Your Plan has no tangible suggestions for how these crossings might be improved.

Objective W5 of the Plan is to maintain Warrington?s Quality of Place. Nothing in the current plan addresses the adverse impact that this South East extension will have on our quality of place. Stockton Lane in particular, being closed to through traffic since an accident on the canal in which two people drowned, is a much loved walkway for the people of South Warrington and there is absolutely nothing in this plan which will replace the loss of amenity we will suffer if the area south of the lane is built over.

Objective W4 of the Plan is to promote sustainable travel in the area. Again, I simply cannot see how you can claim to have addressed this when all you are giving us is vague aspirational statements about what might happen in the future.