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"Mr Spanner said the scheme would also lead to a £29m package of benefits including the planting of 130,000 trees, a 40-acre ecological mitigation area and improvements to the Copdock intersection of the A12 and A14.
He said the construction phase of the project is expected to create 3,500 jobs while a further 1,800 full-time equivalent posts would be provided once it is complete.
The plans also include proposals to build a railway station which would link Great Blakenham with London Liverpool Street and 421 new homes - 35% of which will be affordable housing and will also include...."
I'd love to know just how many of these "1800" jobs will pay enough to enable the fulltime workers to buy these houses!! One would expect that if the houses are a required to home the SnOjoke workers that 95% (not 35%) would be a more realistic percentage...but then it's not about building for them is it, Mr Developer??!!
Smells to me like yet another way for an out of town developer (regardless of "Suffolk" being tagged onto the "temporary" company name) to get planning permission to make a hasty profit and an even hastier retreat soon afterwards, leaving us with another white elephant in less than 10 years time.
Suffolk will end up with more elephants than Hannibal soon.
For the Star to promote this development as akin to CentreParcs in terms of it's perceived future popularity is biased nonsense - one is a family holiday venue which has the potential to appeal to hundreds of thousands of yearly customers, the other a specialist sport facility for a minority number of visitors which I would bet will reduce even further once the novelty has worn off, if built.
If there were a need for a station at Blakenham, the old one wouldn't have been demolished.
But of course there would be the potential for plenty of advertising revenue, so maybe that's why our local paper's editor has taken the developer's standpoint rather than that of the local people.
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