Update 15 Oct

Apologies for the delay publishing more details of the meeting.  We’ve collated our copious notes and will post a summary soon.  However we were hoping that Barratt Homes would have given us sight of their own ‘minutes’ by now and we could have provided an updated blog with combined information.  It’ll be interesting to see if Barratt’s minutes concur with our own, given the issues that were discussed (or side stepped).  So we’ll hold tight and publish asap.

In the mean time, we’ve heard from the council that the application hearing is now likely to be in December!

Orignal post

The meeting with Barratt Homes went ahead this-afternoon.

To enable us to give everyone a quick update, we’d asked if Barratt reps were comfortable with us recording the meeting.  Disappointingly their preference was for the meeting not to be recorded so we put our iPhones away.

As we’re now not able to share recordings, it will take us a few days to collate our notes, but we’ll share them as soon as we have them available.

In brief though, nothing ground breaking took place and Barratt continued to say they are complying with technical requirements for the application ( regardless of or any care for, the reality of the impact on the local community ), even if they did ‘inadvertently’ misrepresent their own data in their own documents..  However, there were several points worth noting which will be interesting to readers and it was interesting to see that Barratt Homes and their Transport expert denied knowledge that they had used significantly incorrect lane widths ( double the actual width ) on Longton Road and also stating that they believed that the traffic queues had been manually counted on Meadow Lane.   So…. we highlighted several misrepresentations of important data in Barratts own transport assessment documents and pointed out that no-one was present in Meadow Lane at any time to count the queues…..

Plenty more to come…..   and in fairness Barratt reps did say they’d look into the facts we pointed out….   It will be interesting to see if we get an honest response from them, which to date has been sadly lacking.

One final comment for tonight…  Barratt’s transport rep now says that they are relying on the inclusion of the cycle lanes as a fully usable part of Longton Road.   They told us that cars regularly use the cycle lane!!!!  really?  anyone seen that?  So that’s more rubbish from their transport advisor and his calculations still mean they rely on Longton Road being used as a dual carriageway….  Incredible eh?  and… in the latest transport assessment from Barratt, they actually claim each lane in Longton Road is over 10m wide… that’s three lanes in each direction, just like the M6!!!!

More to come once we’ve had time to compile three hours worth of notes…..