A PAMPHLET seeking 'consultation' on the Lydney Neighbourhood Development Plan has arrived in my post. Apart from its front page misplaced possessive apostrophe, poor syntax and excessive peppering with ampersands, this is a subject which should concern everyone who cares about the future of the town.

The 'Community Steer Team' which produced the pamphlet can consult all they like, but a few really quite simple changes would make a vast difference to everyone who lives in Lydney, or who visits it; changes that are already glaringly obvious to all.

It has a scruffy, run-down centre (if we are to take the centre as the area between the bus station, the River Lyd and Newerne Street) which should be flattened and revamped as a welcoming market area/public space. Current piecemeal patching-up is pathetic; we still have a used-car lot and car-wash facility as the main town feature. Pedestrianisation of Newerne Street/Hill Street is not essential to improvements, although better traffic-calming is needed   – many thriving towns have through traffic. Entirely one-way perhaps? We'd soon get used to that.

It should make vastly better use of its riverside/canalside with imaginative landscaping and planting. Clearer, better-placed pointers should give directions – and the distance – to currently-hidden attractions like Bathurst Park, the open air swimming pool, the leisure centre, Primrose Hill, the canal-side and Lydney Parish Church, perhaps Taurus.

It should sort out a reliable and regular transport link from the centre incorporating its very remote station primarily (especially at peak times), the Docks, Norchard, and again perhaps Taurus and even in summer time the Wenchford picnic site and Mallard's Pike.

Everyone involved should contribute if this needs a subsidy, with the Forestry Commission certainly not escaping dipping its hand in its pocket: it's about time it realises it has responsibilities beyond the Statutory Forest boundaries. And Dean Forest Railway is ideally placed to run railcar links into town, especially in non-holiday period weekdays and in the wintertime.

A call at the station would add only minutes to Stagecoach's bus services. Nobody should be abandoned at the station, as they are now, with long waits for a bus or a long, long, possibly cold and wet walk into town ahead of them – it's arduous enough for many even in the summer.

Lydney should wring every penny it can from developers for schools, shops, community centres and public open space in new-build estates.

And finally, glaringly, the Docks/Harbour area is approached by a grim, unscreened industrial landscape and, admirable as it is when you get there, it has no toilets or a refreshment outlet.

Oh, and a freely-available map of the town and its facilities for visitors would be useful. And did I omit mending the pavements?

Put these improvements in place, I contend, and you'll attract all the economic growth and inward investment you need to create a great future for a growing town.

Come on Lydney, you can do better. But not if you sit back and let the Community Steer team, whatever that might be, go it alone. It sounds a bit like 'OK, have your say but we'll end up steering you in the direction we want to go'. And if the usual suspects are involved I'm awfully afraid that's the way it will go, with a lack of broad vision and pettifogging party politics stifling any realistic changes.

As for so-called initiatives like 'Localism', much-vaunted in the pamphlet, in my experience they have a half-life of a couple of years, five at most, before the next one comes along.

At approaching 70 I may not be around when the Development Plan comes to fruition, but even if I get somewhere along the way I'll be pleasantly surprised if somebody gets off their bum and starts actually doing something about the town's ills rather than endlessly 'consulting', a much devalued word, which has a place (it might hurt!) with 'localism'.

What do they expect 'consulting' to find, assuming they are not just paying it lip-service – a magic bullet?

Seems to me we've been 'consulting' for tens of years now (remember the Market Towns Initiative?) at great expense and with little to show for it bar a few - admirable as they are - flower pots and finger-posts.

– Denis Lamb, Blakeney.