Mobile Phone Masts - an update. Some of the members here might remember my situation with a phone company wanting to erect a 42 Ft high mobile phone mast across the road from my house. In June this year our local Council rejected the proposal after the residents here complained. In September the phone company appealed and now the decision lies in the hands of the High Court. We are still waiting to hear about the decision. However, today our local newspaper had this on the front page - http://www.thisisstaffordshire.co.u...tentPK=15884627&folderPk=87654&pNodeId=158324 Now it makes me angry to think that we were told we CANNOT specify the health implications in our letters of complaint for the appeal as we were told that the High Court does NOT take health as a reason for rejecting the mast. According to the Government, the masts are operating within guidelines. Guess what? I'm not gonna be part of their statistics in 10 years' time. I'm not gonna be part of their lil experiment. Already there is a mast just 200 yards from my house that was passed without our knowledge, and there is one a quarter of a mile away too. This mast proposal means there could be another one just a few metres from my house. I hate mobile phones, hate them hate them hate them!!!
Apparently all they are required to do is stick a laminated A4 sized poster on a nearby tree or street light, and they have fulfilled their obligation to notify the general public. We only found out about this mast proposal because a neighbour walking his dog found the poster on the path after it had blown off - he literally stumbled across it. We called the Council and they said that they had fulfilled their obligation - no matter that it had blown off, they never replaced the notice on the street light. So basically, they can put the notice there one day, and remove it the next if they want to. They get 20,000 for each mast they approve. If they reject it and the phone company appeals and wins, the council are fined 20,000. In our case, the residents formed a group and challenged the proposal quite strongly. The mast that was passed without our knowledge was done on the old Council policy - now they have a Planning Committee which allows residents to send in complaints before a decision is made. Sadly, we cannot do anything about the one that was already approved.
Post? Nah that costs money and they won't do that. Heck, even our local medical centre refused to send mail shots to patients informing them of their new phone number (changed in June). Of course, as it's just ONE DIGIT different from my number, *I* get lots of calls almost everyday from those who misheard the new number on the old answerphone, or those who got the correct number but misdialled it. I guess that's another gripe for another day, best left unsaid. LOL! I had better go to sleep now and quit whining.
We had the same situation a few weeks ago. The church that we live next door to wanted to build a cell phone tower pretty much in our backyard. I'm pretty sure that the neighbors, and us, have protested enough that the church changed their mind.
