Sir, We were pleased to read in the Herald that the planning application for the area around the old Didcot Labour Club has been put on hold.

The application — seen as phase one of the wider “Didcot Gateway” development for the land opposite the railway station — is hugely flawed. A spokesman for the Homes and Communties Agency, the landowners, was quoted as saying that the delay “will give all parties time to consider how the plans for this site fit into the wider plans”. “All parties”? Who can he mean? Not the people who actually live near the site, that’s for sure. As local residents — living within 30 feet of the site — we have never had any say in the plans for this development.

The developers have ticked the statutory “community engagement” boxes by, they say: “consulting on the plans”.

This means an exhibition in the Civic Hall presenting the plans they had already put together: a seven-storey hotel overlooking the nursery school, multi-storey car park, blocks of flats, public open spaces, semi-pedestrianising of Station Road, etc. That’s a different use of the word “consultation” from what normal people would mean by it. It means telling us what they have already decided, asking what we think and then ignoring it. Informing us, not consulting us. Of course, people who live in the area want to see it regenerated. But we want to see something that is good for residents and good for the town and that has been created with proper local knowledge.

And when someone talks about ‘all parties’, we’d like that to include us.

John Dakin and Penny Dakin Kiley

Lydalls Road

Didcot