I was reading one of the free London papers on the way home from work the other evening and stumbled upon an article about recycling. It detailed a poor 74 year old man who had put his rubbish bins out only to return to them the next morning to find they hadn’t been taking away and a note had been left on his bin.

On closer inspection of the note it seemed that because he had left 1 teabag in the bin that it had been branded as “contaminated”. Now I am a stickler for the rules as much as the next guy, but refusing to take away a whole week’s rubbish due to 1 tea bag is just pathetic.

This leads on to a similar story in which an old lady who struggled to lift her heavy bins out for the dustmen was greated by a ’sorry we can’t take them away’ response from one of the dustmen. The reason this time was because they were too heavy and against EU legislation with regards to the health and safety.

It seems to me that the government is completely out of touch with the real world and when it comes to common sense, there is none.

The UK Government plans to build 3 million houses by 2020. Part of this is the proposal is to build an ‘Eco Town’ between Elsenham & Henham. This will constitute 5,000 new houses being built on a Greenfield site. Currently the population of Elsenham is about 1500. So even with a low estimation of 2 people per new house, this would increase the population from 1500 to 11500.

A blow for village history, character and the environment

To cut a long story short this will ruin the scenery, history, atmosphere and environment of both Henham and Elsenham. The current infrastructure of roads and railway can’t cope with the present population (I travel to London every day and the train is already operating at capacity a.k.a overcrowded).

There is an online government petition where you can sign up with an email address (that won’t be spammed) to show your support against this proposal.

Sign the petition

There are currently 558 signatures on the petition, please show your support and sign up here: http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/kenmcneil/

Thanks!

NB. You must be a British citizen or resident to sign the petition.

Update 18 June 2008

There are now 714 signatures on the petition, that is nearly 200 additional signatures over the last 7 days which is great news!

Current pictures of Elsenham/Ugley Green

For reference, currently Elsenham/Henham and Ugley Green look like this, with your help we can keep it this way!