to Bellway

Dear Lauren

Thank you for the appointment at 11 am on Monday 26 August.  My wife and I will be there.

Please pass this on to your Head Office - for a reply:

It is brilliant that Bellway has taken over this brown field site for housing development and that the front building is being converted into modest, eco-apartments.

My concerns, as they were with the Gables housing development in Hagley, are these:

1. There is a moderately fast, growing population in the UK to exacerbate a worsening housing crisis that started last century.
2. Gracious and spacious housing provision, as we saw last decade with the Gables, is certainly less obvious at Harvino so that is great.
3. However, in my opinion, each unit is still too large on the main site behind the front block of eco-apartments in the Blue Bird building.  Housing units must be more densely provided because land is in limited supply and must be used for growing our food and for giving nature more room to breathe and survive.  We are part of nature, after all!
4. Most of us want an ever more prosperous lifestyle but that cannot be delivered on a planet that is not growing and never can grow to keep pace with our ever more greedy demands placed upon it (called economic growth).
5. Most of the housing at Harvino is for the wealthy with every adult owning a car, as my wife and I both do.  But, since 1976, we have been living and, brought up two children, in a modest, eco-home that is a mid-terrace, three storey town house at 28 Hunnington Crescent, Halesowen.
6. This house has been plenty big enough over these 48 years!
7. Even the wealthy, like ourselves, must be prepared to live more simply so that others may simply live.
8. This home of ours is a mini power station with, literally, every roof tile covered in solar panels since 2013.
9. As a result, since we had the gas meter taken out on the 30 November 2023, we spent 50p/day on total energy and 50p/day on the electricity standing charge to Octopus, over these first eight months.
10. If every roof was pitched E/W and plastered with PV solar, like ours, on your new Bellway housing estates, every home would supply nearly all of their energy needs from the sun, so fewer power stations would be needed.  And fewer solar farms and fewer battery storage sites, too!

RECOMMENDATIONS

Every new home must be 100% electricity.

Must be E/W oriented to have 100% covering of PV solar panels.

The battery storage must be double the power of the solar array.

To save energy, every new home should have the lounge, dining, kitchen on the first floor with bedrooms and bathrooms on the ground floor.  Upside down living!  Old age infirmities and disabilities are catered for in this way, too!

The garden, front and back, should be no bigger than our own at 28 Hunnington Crescent - pretty modest, so a tall order!

I would like comments, feedback, criticism from your experts at Head Office - PLEASE!