IN response to Sinead Gracie, of course the council is responsible for planning permission and for environmental issues.

The point is the North West Properties in the Isle of Man appear not to give a damn about those issues. Having been told that they needed planning permission to demolish part of the Elms Precinct, they went ahead without it.

As for my not informing anyone what has been going on, my colleagues and I have been present at innumerable meetings both in the Community Centre at Green Lane, on site at Elms Square and in the Town Hall and have on all occasions tried as hard as we could to explain to people what was happening and what our options were for doing something about it. I have spoken almost on a weekly basis to local reporters as a glance at back copies of the Prestwich and Whitefield Guide will show.

My personal involvement with Elms Precinct included trying to stop the excavators on site on the Saturday morning when they moved in. Although obviously I was not successful in single-handedly stopping them, I did at least get close enough to photograph the faces of the drivers of the excavators and the foreman on site and to persuade them to put up a proper safety fence, albeit six hours after they started demolition.

During the months since it has happened we have tried hard to get through to North West Properties in efforts to get them to: leave Elms Precinct in a safe state; tidy up the mess that they have made of it; give us some indication of what their intentions re for the future of Elms Precinct.

To date we haven't had a great deal of success but anyone who understands the legal system will realise that we had to give North West Properties what the courts might consider to be a reasonable time in which to act before serving them with an Enforcement Notice.

Until her recent letter, Ms Gracie has been conspicuous by her absence from our meetings, nor has she previously approached me or my colleagues on this issue. If she is genuinely interested in the issue as opposed to simply scoring points, then I hope she will attend the first meeting of the Whitefield and Unsworth Area Board which was originally intended to be held at Castlebrook High School but has now been switched to the Community Hall at Green Lane in Whitefield, in the hope that the people most obviously affected by the current state of the Elms Precinct will attend in force so that we can discuss this issue further.

DEREK BODEN

Leader of the Council

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