Sir, – Development plans for new housing provision in North Northallerton over the next decade were given the PR treatment at town's Golden Lion Hotel.

The seasoned observer of local authority planning and its political processes might well have been sceptical that this promotional meeting would be anything other than total waste of time and space. Members of the Allertonshire Civic Society who attended the consultation exercise found this scepticism wholly justified.

We regret that the forum was purely a vehicle for the developers to show their wares, a set of pretty pictures to show their houses and their approximate location in the context of the proposed “relief” road. It was merely a pictorial re-statement of the original plans, submitted and highly criticised four years ago for their lack of any detailed consideration of how traffic problems created by the planned development were likely to be handled.

We regret that neither county and district councillors nor officers from the highways department of North Yorkshire County Council were present to answer the many queries and challenges that the proposition created. The developers’ staff struggled valiantly to deal with questions about traffic flow, congestion and access, acknowledging that such issues were beyond their remit but would doubtless be fully available when the detailed substantive plans were submitted.

We regret that the relief road will be anything of a relief. It is designed to allow traffic out of the site onto two roundabouts that will slow down the north and south traffic from both the Darlington and Stokesley roads. It is designed to slow any throughput by its curvature and single carriageway. The statement by one of the developers present that the scheme was designed to ease congestion on Quaker Lane defies imagination.

We regret that the plans for the new estate will only add to the congestion at Low Gates level crossing (see our letter to D&S Times 29.8.11) – unless Highways expects that all the off-estate traffic will move north to its work places in Stockton and Middlesbrough. We did not expect that any comments then would be taken seriously by the county council, given its predilection to run a steamroller over Northallerton’s concerns, and we were not surprised.

JOHN EDWARDS

Allertonshire Civic Society, Northallerton.