Letter to the Editor: The Cinderford Northern Quarter (CNQ) has always been “Never Never Land”. Everything would just happen if we believed in it hard enough.

The 1,200 new jobs and £100m of private investment that the CNQ scheme promised have not appeared. 

A study showed in 2014 that the scheme wasn’t viable, especially for the employment land, but that was completely ignored at the time. 

The college moved from Five Acres in 2018, losing the theatre, sports centre and swimming pool along the way. It left a derelict site at Five Acres, now a building site. 

We will see how far the Levelling Up money goes towards building a sports centre there.

The cabinet of Forest of Dean Council has now considered the report from the long running CNQ Scrutiny Inquiry.

The cabinet rejected the recommendation in the report to investigate a new route for the Spine Road through Hawkwell Inclosure. This was suggested because the council don’t own all the land of the original route. But cabinet now believe that it is unlikely there will ever be any more road built as there doesn’t seem to be any funding for it, due to the huge overspend on the first section of road.

However, cabinet did agree to investigate a pie in the sky proposal in the Inquiry report for moving Steam Mills school onto the CNQ, then moving the cricket ground to Steam Mills and building industrial units on the cricket ground. They also agreed to explore alternatives to normal housing, even though building any housing without the complete Spine Road would increase the traffic through Steam Mills.

When will the corpse of the CNQ fantasy finally be buried? It really is time to grow up and leave Never Never land to Peter and Wendy.

Cinderford Resident