CLLR Carr says (twice) in last week’s Andover Advertiser that a planning inspecnew local plan – the one that calls for a minimum of 10,500 houses to be built in the next 13 years – to be sound.

Although the plan may be sound in some technical sense, Cllr Carr says nothing about the soundness of the philosophy of his administration in drawing up this and previous plans.

The preface to the plan pays lip service to preserving the beauty and character of Test Valley, but the underlying philosophy seems to be that Andover (and Romsey) should grow as fast as possible.

Thus we have a housing target that is 83 per cent higher than government projections.

So this is definitely not a plan for providing local homes for local people.

It is a plan designed to attract in as many new residents as possible, although where all of these extra people are going to come from is not stated.

In the previous local plan, Cllr Carr and his colleagues overruled the recommendations of the then local plan inspectors and went ahead with the isolated development at Picket Twenty.

They also ignored the advice of the inspectors by going ahead with their plan to double the size of Andover Airfield Business Park to permit it to become a massive base for storage and distribution warehouses.

Neither of these developments have exactly enhanced the character or appearance of Test Valley.

Approval for the airfield storage and distribution developments was given because TVBC said Andover needed the extra jobs, and now TVBC is justifying its massive housing allocations because it says we need houses for all of the extra workers that are going to come to the district.

What we need is some coherence and a vision which embraces ambitions of quality, rather than just mindless growth.

John Moon, Duck Street, Abbotts Ann.