East Sussex County Council

We now come to the news from the Hailsham and Polgate region, generously sponsored by Barraclough's The Opticians.

Hellingley residents opposing plans for up to 280 homes in the village have taken their campaign directly to Wealdon District Council.

Resident Nicola Walker hand-delivered a file containing 300 objections, to the council offices in Hailsham as campaigners also gathered outside with banners reading, Hellingley says no.

The objections were delivered in addition to those already submitted through Wealdon's online planning portal, with the total number of objections believed to be as high as 600.

More than 50 villagers gathered on the public footpath crossing the proposed development site in September to demonstrate.

A spokesperson for the campaign, Serena Schellenberg, said...

We wanted to bring these objections right to the Council's door.

The strength of feeling in Hellingley is extraordinary.

In England, two county councils are taking legal action over the government's local government reorganization plans.

According to Local Gov, East Sussex County Council has lodged a protective application for judicial review to preserve its position on time limits.

And Kent County Council is also proceeding with a challenge, saying ministers have not explained how they reached the preferred four unitary model for Kent.

The government paused the wider review in September and says it will set out next steps in due course.

It's every parent's worst nightmare." Tuki is fighting for road safety to be improved on the A271 Amberstone, near the junctions Linnet Lane and Trefoil Road.

On Wednesday, September sixteenth, she organized a protest at the site to shed some light on how busy the road actually is, the amount of vehicles and speed, in hopes that East Sussex County Council Highway would come and assess it.

Protesters gathered at the roadside in support of greater safety measures, such as a zebra crossing.

The mum said, "Honestly, it felt amazing seeing all the people coming out to support us.

Hopefully, it will be in a few months.

We would rather they collect evidence during school hours so everyone can see how dangerous it is.

The next step is to take the data to East Sussex County Council Highways and Wealden District Council to show them we need a different kind of crossing."

The final Hailsham Street Market of twenty twenty-six season brought traders, shoppers, and visitors together in Vicarage Field on Friday the twenty-fifth of September, attracting a steady flow of shoppers throughout the morning.

but the danger of one road is stopping them.

The SNUC had previously been the lead signatory on the petition calling on East Sussex County Council to install a new crossing on the road.

This petition, which gathered more than a thousand signatures, was considered by Councillor Peter Griffiths, the Authority's lead member for Transport and Environment, at a meeting in July.

In a report to Councillor Griffiths at the time, council officers had said the potential of installing a crossing on the road had been assessed, but not met the necessary benchmark to move ahead this year.

But officers also said they intended to explore alternative funding options, including a potential bid to Wealden District Council for Community Infrastructure Levy, CIL, monies, funding secured from housing developers as part of the planning process.

The County Council reaffirmed this position when approached by the LDRS after the protest.

An East Sussex County Council spokesperson said, Road safety improvements, including pedestrian crossings and traffic calming measures, are assessed against our local transport plan to ensure the limited budget we have is focused on the highest priority schemes.

The Amberstone Crossing did not score highly enough to secure funding from the County Council's capital budget.

So we've done a fair bit in that project.

The most directly related project that we work on is with East Sussex County Council and the Blue Heart Project, which is a similar FCIP-funded service, which we've built a, a warning service for surface water flooding specifically.

That one is a little bit harder, I suppose, to talk about risk specifically because the warning side of that ended up being more of a deprioritized item in the end.

It's become more of an educational site using some of the, the sensor data that they have.