We have a property developer, let's call him Matt. He's not like Matt Crawford. He comes from the village but doesn't live here any more. He has a friend on the Parish and District Councils (one friend, two councils.) His friend helps him out with planning applications. If this was the Archers, then he would be uncovered, exposed and dealt with. Here in MBTTA, this doesn't happen and life continues. Let's call Matt's friend, Derek Fletcher.
Matt has a piece of land in the village. Disappointingly for him, it is outside the development curtlidge of the village and he stands no chance of getting planning permission.
The only way you can build outside the development curtlidge of the village is to build social housing (as owned by a council or housing association.) This doesn't suit Matt, who wants to build and sell some houses.
Matt's first gambit to get around this was to offer to build some houses for the housing associattion, that they could rent out for a period of five years, after which they reverted to him. Not surprisingly, they turned it down.
His next gambit was to write to the Parish Council, with some ersatz version of social housing that still allowed him to build and sell the houses, asking for their blessing. If he got their blessing, Matt could go to the planners and push for planning permission to be granted.
The Parish Coucil saw this coming and neatly sidestepped the issue by pointing out that since the scheme wasn't really social housing, they really couldn't offer a view.
Here comes the bizarre point; when it was suggested that the Council write to Matt to let him know that they weren't going to offer a view on his scheme, Derek went ballistic, claiming not only should we not write to him, but to do so would land the Council in some sort of unspecified trouble. So no letter was sent.
The bizarreness continues: at the next meeting of the Council, Matt turned up, demanding to know why the Council had been so rude as to not reply to his letter. When it was pointed out that it was Derek Fletcher who had been against writing the letter, Matt refused to believe it. Derek sat stony faced during the revelation. Now, in Ambridge, for the convenience of the listener, this would have been quickly cleared up. Not here is Not Ambridge! Here, in the face of overwhelming evidence, Matt continues to refuse to believe that Derek could be the source of his chagrin. I fear it will remain so in a land where plot lines are seldom neatly cleared up.
