Letter: Will Our Grandchildren Forgive Us for Neglecting Infrastructure?

Published on: 28 Dec, 2025
Updated on: 28 Dec, 2025

From Anthony Mallard

In response to: Large, Controversial Developments Planned for Guildford – Will Infrastructure Cope?

I first came to Guildford in 1954, aged six, to spend time with my cousins.

I came to live in Guildford some 32 years later, in 1986. At that time the slip road joining the A3 to the London Road had a large sign adjacent to it stating “Martin Grant Homes coming soon”.

Here we are a further 39 years on and the likelihood of the significant development is getting ever closer to the exhortation “coming soon” whether a threat or a promise.

What has changed? The planning process has been liberated in favour of development, which, depending on one’s viewpoint, is either to be welcomed or opposed.

The possibility of homes for local people may also be on the horizon but will they be able to afford them? Places for Travellers will be made – a good idea or not, the jury is out I suspect on this one. Provision is also to be made for Education and medical facilities but will the Education Service or the NHS take up the opportunity, neither has to.

What hasn’t changed is the local infrastructure. The local roads are as they were in 1954 – indeed, probably in the case of the London Road as it was in late Victorian times. However they are hugely busier.

The sewage pipes are inadequate as are the utility services, water, gas and electricity, The possibility of local flooding due to climate change is very real. Public transport services have been decimated. Yet nothing has been done to remedy any of these challenges in decades.

Surely, if these developments, urbanising semi-rural areas, are to be undertaken, crucial services and other essential infrastructure must be put in place, and binding agreements made in respect of education and health, before the first building work commences.

It isn’t enough to rely on the good will or unenforceable promises of the developer, whose understandable ambition is to deliver to its company as much profit as can be squeezed from a site as is possible within the legislation pertaining at the time.

There should and must be protection for the existing local community. Can we rely on our planners – shortly, by central government diktat, to be undemocratically distant from the communities they purport to serve – to consider these needs before it grants permission? Regretfully, I don’t think we can.

Will our grandchildren and their children thank us if we simply watch this happen without actively doing something about it. I think not. Food for thought perhaps.