Never let it be said that our district council Cabinet fully support Lydney or its future.

Last year, the government introduced a £675 million Future High Streets fund allowing local communities the chance to regenerate their high streets.

Lydney’s need for town centre regeneration is well known, with housing developments poorly served by existing infrastructure and population growth clearly exceeding capacity.

Losing our police station, registrar and bank hasn’t helped and abolishing the Severn Bridge tolls only increases our appeal to commuters.

Naturally therefore, our town council jumped at the chance to bid for funding to address these issues.

A £14.8 million application was prepared, requesting funds to support physical improvements to our town centre, relieve constraints on our highways and improve Lydney’s shop fronts.

When considering our bid however, the district council Cabinet chose not to support Lydney as we didn’t show enough evidence of ‘town centre challenges’ to score highly enough.

This despite a 75 per cent fall in our town’s footfall over 19 years, an obvious increase in the number of vacant units and a clear drop in commercial diversity.

Not to mention 2,200 additional homes with planning consent here and roughly only 300 completed to date.

With this in mind, I’d invite any serving Cabinet member to re-visit Lydney’s High Street and re-evaluate their view.

Lydney has great potential to succeed but only if people give us a chance to begin with. As with the now infamo

us Forest of Dean hospitals ‘consultation’ by NHS Gloucestershire CCG, it’s once again ‘maybe next time’ for Lydney. 

A very great shame.

- Harry Ives, Lydney.