"Oh what a tangled web we weave, when once we practise to deceive.
The Campaign to stop exploration at the controversial Loxley Field in Dunsfold has reached almost £33,000.
Continue reading “Will the new Prime Minister allow UCOG to drill at Dunsfold?”
All those nice new houses at the Dunsfold Park Garden Village and one of the largest gipsy sites in the country with fracking going on right underneath them as farmer Ashley Ward prepares to welcome UK Oil & Gas into his back garden next door?
Farmer pulls the wool over Waverley Planners’ eyes – yet again.
The David & Goliath type fight is on to reverse the decision for UKOG to drill at Dunsfold.
IS THE ‘DUNSFOLD’ WORD – ABOUT TO BECOME WAVERLEY’S VERY OWN ‘BREXIT’ WORD?
However, Dunsfold Parish Councillor Stephen Haines did turn up for the public meeting. One of the guys pictured next to the serving hatch we believe?
Dunsfold doesn’t normally get 120 or so people turning out on a Sunday to meetings so it looks like the parish pump wallers may now be taking things seriously?
Congratulations Beverley. Another act in the Awfold pantomime ?
They obviously don’t want oil wells, as well as thousands of homes in their backyards? No doubt all the usual parish councils will be working with Protect Our Waverley, and Crystal Tips Weddell will be collecting shedloads more taxpayers’ cash to fund the fight? Just to recap – last time she collected £276,000 to fight off development at Dunsfold Aerodrome- so that £50,000 VAT could be reclaimed and paid out to lawyers to fight ‘Your Waverley who gives them the Precept, to help them to do so!
Residents heard UK Oil and Gas outline its plans to drill for oil near Dunsfold village at the aptly named site – PRATTS CORNER? However, opponents of oil exploration across southern England stirred up the locals to challenge the company about its plans in the village.
Environmentalist, Nicola Peel, who campaigned against UKOG’s operation at Broadford Bridge, told the audience:
“You need to ask UKOG very specific questions.”
John Gray, the village’s representative on Waverley Borough Council, said:
“It is very much down to people of Dunsfold to get themselves organised”.
Well – he should know a thing or two about that! He has been working, behind the scenes, with the ProtectOr Waverley Group – who together with the CPRE have been opposing development in Dunsfold for years, at huge cost to the very same borough council of which he is a member!
Julian Neal, a member of Markwells Wood Watch, said villagers should lobby their MPs and councillors. He said the Conservative MP, Penny Mordant, had supported his group’s campaign against UKOG’s proposals at Markwells Wood:
“I was able to convince Penny Mordant in a hour-and-a-half meeting of the environmental and public health dangers of the Markwells Wood proposals.”
The first indication of UKOG’s plans for Dunsfold emerged just over a week ago when letters were distributed in the village on 15 February 2019. (DrillOrDrop
UKOG said it was looking at a site northeast of the village. It did not identify the exact location but residents described the site as Pratt’s Corner.
A Don’t Drill Dunsfold Facebook page was established within hours of the UKOG letters being distributed and Sunday’s meeting was organised days later. The venue changed to a larger room because too many people wanted to attend.
UKOG issued a press statement last week to address questions it said it was being asked about the plans for Dunsfold.
The company’s chief executive, Stephen Sanderson, said he hoped to “fully engage” with residents. He accused, what he described as, “well-known and ill-informed scaremongers” of “circulating fiction” about the company’s plans for exploratory drilling in Dunsfold.
WW has ascertained from local records that similar Drilling took place in Alfold in the 1990s and although there was a public outcry, exploratory drilling went ahead near the village school. It took a matter of weeks, gas was found – there was no disruption or nuisance, but no further drilling took place.
Whose cunning plan was that, WW wonders, to frighten the voting fodder witless?
We’re aware that Dunsfold Airfield may soon have oil-wells springing up along its runway (journalistic licence for gas exploration, in the Dunsfold environs!) but a £14m leisure centre too?
Somehow, we doubt it!
We haven’t asked the Flying Scotsman to confirm or deny the rumour – as we think he must still be miffed with us for publishing his off-line invite to the ungrateful Denise Wordsworth to join him for tea and biscuits, for he never responds to our emails … and he’s certainly never invited us round for tea!)
But in this particular instance, we think we can safely speak for him. Because if he had thousands of Cranleigh New town’s residents rocking up on his doorstep for a swim and a jog around the parkland, there ’d be hell-to-pay from the Provisional Wing of Protect Our Waverley. They may have gone preternaturally quiet since losing all their Judicial Reviews but that’s just made them even more determined to look for an opportunity to take the steam out of the Flying Scot’s funnel at finally bagging 1,800 – 2,300 homes. His sporran must over-floweth!
However, we understand there’s considerable angst amongst Waverley officers – our moles there are very reliable – because, thanks to Cranleigh Parish Council handing over a piece of parish land it once owned to a local charity for a private care home – the new leisure centre may have to stay exactly where it is! If it’s demolished the centre will be closed for a couple of years and clubs and members of the public will have, perforce, to take a dip in the lakes which the generous Mr Vrijland intends to build in the nearby Knowle Park as part of his ambition to
“give something back to the people of Cranleigh,”
all whilst trousering squillions from the sale of his former lettuce nursery to provide the people of Cranleigh with 265 homes and now he’s asking for more!!
