On waiting list for years.

I was hugely disappointed to read that plans for the development of allotments on Honiton Bottom Road may not go ahead.

Having been on the allotment waiting list for some years, I was hopeful that we were, at long last, to be provided with a facility.

The only realistic prospect of getting allotments is for the council to buy some land, but with the constraints on council expenditure that seems unlikely to happen.

What is particularly galling is the campaigners’ pronouncement that the area has been preserved as a community facility.

The planning application submitted by Honiton Town Council was much more an attempt to ensure the land was available for community use; it would have been available to those of the community on the allotment waiting list, and the pupils of Millwater School, who were to be provided with a plot, as well as those who want to walk their dogs.

The headlong rush to have the area designated as a village green was for precisely the opposite reason. It was a campaign by one group of the community, who have access to almost limitless facilities in and around Honiton, to exclude others in the community who have access to no facility whatsoever.

Martyn Harris

Linhay Close

Honiton