STROUD District Council (SDC) deserves our applause and congratulations on settling the Stroud District Local Plan.

This has been a priority and a challenge since 2011 when the government swept away the existing development strategies of all local authorities and with them the settled national planning laws.

This opened up a free-for-all in the vacuum that was left.

Whilst five years is a long time, SDC is the first district council in Gloucestershire to complete the process.

In that time, the councillors and the local community have battled a relentless onslaught of predatory applications from developers seeking to exploit the hiatus and cherry pick some of our finest countryside to suffer their concrete mixers.

We have a lost a few but frustrated many.

Now the developers will find it much harder to assert their claims to build where they want on account of the lack of a local plan which will deliver the houses we need.

But we must not be complacent.

Our fight is not yet won.

The Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty that is Grange Fields in the Painswick Valley awaits its fate and Baxters Fields in the Slad Valley are yet again subject of planning applications by developers unwilling to accept that these places are special as they are.

We must show our objection to these just as surely as we have their predecessors.

Perhaps that is all the more important now to ensure that the difficult compromises councillors have made and the sacrifices of some of our communities in yielding greenfield sites to meet the need for housing, were not in vain and we will not give up on our most treasured landscapes.

Simon Arundel

Stroud