Philip Coote, planning consultant for housebuilders Springfield Developments, speaks with the world-weary voice of experience when he declares that protests over new building schemes are largely prompted by self-interest and that he "doesn't hold much with what residents say."

It's true that often the people who raise objections, like many of those currently challenging an application to build more new homes on an allotment site off Sandy Lane, do so because they have a strong personal stake in plans not going ahead. That surely doesn't make their opposition any less valid.

Mr Coote's company, too, has a powerful vested interest. In its case a great deal of profit hinges on winning planning approval. Both these positions are perfectly understandable. It is the responsibility of the Council's planning officers and councillors to weigh up the pros and cons.

On the one hand, there is an undisputed need for more homes in a metropolitan district with a growing population. But to set against that is the pressure which will be put on the schools and roads and the further bite into the greenery which attracted existing residents to this area in the first place and made their homes worth the price they paid for them.

Given that the Sandy Lane area has already seen so much new building that it is beginning to lose its character and is joining the urban sprawl, the existing residents are fully justified in trying to persuade the planners to "hold with what they say" rather more sympathetically than Mr Coote does.