PRESS RELEASE 16th APRIL 2008

A CHANCE TO HAVE YOUR SAY – AT LAST!!

We at FLAT are very pleased to see that Marshland Windfarm Ltd have finally given in to public pressure and have agreed to both reschedule the cancelled Marshland St James consultation event and also hold a new event at Tilney St Lawrence.  These consultation events are long overdue and the consortium’s newly appointed PR Company has obviously realised that Marshland Windfarm Ltd can no longer hide behind ridiculous claims about Health and Safety risks in order to postpone them.  We hope that these consultation evenings will be run along similar lines to the previous events and include representatives from the developers, turbine manufacturers, consortium and environmental consultants.  To fob us off with just the two local consultants ie Bruce Pittingale and Ian Robinson would be an insult to the local community and would do nothing to make people feel that their views will be taken seriously.

The dates for these events are Thursday 1st May 2008 at Marshland Jubilee Hall and Friday the 2nd of May at Tilney Village Hall.  Both events will be open from 4 to 9 pm.

We at FLAT would encourage everyone who is concerned about the proposal (to build nineteen, 460ft high turbines) to attend these events and make their views known to the developers.  This will probably be your only opportunity to formally give your views directly to the developers, so please ensure you are involved.  We would encourage you to let the developers know exactly what you think about the proposal - but please ensure that this is done in a calm and democratic way.  It is especially important to fill in their consultation form in a way that make’s it crystal clear that you object to the proposal.

Some of the recent unforgivable attacks of vandalism (on members of both sides of the debate) have shown that things are beginning to get out of hand. We hope that these consultation events will enable feelings in the area to calm down and that Marshland Windfarm Ltd will not inflame the situation further by giving a totally false feedback to the press in the way that they did with the Tilney and Emneth events.

We will be helping to ensure that the Marshland Windfarm Ltd’s consultation events are well attended by leaflet dropping Marshland, Tilney and some of Terrington St John to ensure that everyone is aware of the events. 

Please do not be put off by recent press articles claiming that a huge security presence is required in order to protect people attending these meetings.  We at FLAT have held meetings which have been attended by over 300 people and have never needed a constant police presence.  We firmly believe that this is just another example of the developers using the press to distort the true picture and we feel this is slur on the people of Marshland St James who have been demonised by both the consultants and the consortium.

FLAT can be contacted via our website ie www.flat-group.co.uk.

The FLAT Committee