SIR: The Boomtown Fair currently has a temporary planning permission to hold the Boomtown Event until 2024. This temporary permission was granted in 2019 to allow sufficiently detailed ecological studies to be conducted, over a number of years, to determine the environmental impact of holding such a vast and disruptive event in the sensitive habitats within the South Downs National Park. The SDNP planning authority determined that this must be done before a permanent permission could be granted. Yet early in 2021, Boomtown have submitted a new application for a permanent permission and a further increase in capacity of around 11,000 attendees. The new application has been prepared at huge cost with over 1,300 pages of documentation submitted from a range of expensive consultants.

Why is Boomtown willing to spend such significant amounts of money on an unnecessary, premature and entirely inappropriate planning application? Surely if they were suffering financially due to the coronavirus pandemic, they would choose to save this money until needed towards the end of the temporary planning period? If there is surplus cash it should be funding the essential ecological studies that have been requested by the planners.

As a local who farms and lives close to the Boomtown Festival site I am appalled at the sum of money that has been handed to the Boomtown Festival that will essentially be funding their relentless drive to increase scale and profits. The money will end up being used against our village and the many other local communities that are currently in the process of fighting this latest planning application. The disruptive effects on the landscape, the wildlife and the local communities in and around the Matterley Estate is huge and completely undesirable. So far the South Downs National Park Authorities have totally failed to keep the festival at a sustainable scale. This cash injection of tax payers' money essentially puts commercial profits ahead of public interest. The money would have been better utilised preserving and enhancing the South Downs National Park.

Neil Saunders,

Westfield Drove,

Beauworth,

Alresford