Full text:
I live in (REDACTED) and I drive that route in and out of Macclesfield most days. I've also lived in Macclesfield town centre and in Hurdsfield in the past. I understand this stage isn't about deciding individual sites, I just want to put on record what the lane near me is actually like, because I don't think it can be seen properly from a map.
A field off Bullocks Lane has been submitted through the call for sites. Here is what's on that lane:
• Two old stone bridges, one over private property and one over the canal. Both narrow the road at fixed points.
• The garden centre and Sutton Hall are directly opposite the field.
• It's a 60mph road.
• It meets Byron's Lane, which carries a lot of traffic in its own right and has its own pinch points around Gurnett, including a stretch that is currently sunken.
During the sheepdog trials on 8 and 9 August this year, cars parked along one side of Bullocks Lane and it went down to single-file traffic. It was a one-off weekend event on a neighbouring field, but what it did show is how little extra traffic it takes before this lane stops working properly.
There's also the condition of these roads, which is a separate problem from their width. Potholes and broken surfaces are a normal part of driving around here rather than an occasional thing, and when they appear they tend to stay. I raise it because of the assumption sitting underneath all of this: that if more traffic arrives, the roads will be improved to cope with it. Judging by how the network is maintained as it stands, I am not confident that is a safe assumption.
On the site assessment work, I'd ask that someone walks or drives a lane like this before a site on it is judged deliverable. Road width, bridges, existing pinch points, the speed limit — the things you can only really see by being there.
On buses: the 14A is the only service through Sutton and it runs six times a day. The earliest it gets into Macclesfield is 08:25, which is too late to make a connection to get into Manchester for 9am, and the last one back arrives at 17:49, well before the evening trains stop. Walking to the station takes about half an hour, which isn't realistic in bad weather or carrying luggage. Having lived in town and in Hurdsfield too, I'd say buses not matching train times isn't only a Sutton problem. If the plan wants people to drive less, the bus service has to make that possible.
On local services, I can only tell you what I notice as a resident. Getting a GP appointment is harder than it used to be. The town centre keeps losing shops and pubs, and they aren't being replaced by the everyday things a growing population needs. It doesn't appear that any of this has grown alongside the housing that's already been built. Macclesfield General Hospital, whilst genuinely a good hospital, is quite small and there's not even enough parking to suit the capacity. We've spent numerous nights in A&E there in the past 18 months and the wait times are multiple hours at a minimum. Whilst this is not exactly a Council issue directly, adding hundreds if not thousands of new homes to the region without planning ahead would certainly exacerbate that.
On the wider picture: Bollin Grange and The Meadow on Gaw End Lane, the old King's School sites at Fence Avenue and Cumberland Street, and the Danes Moss site are all recent or current developments around the edge of town, feeding onto the same roads into the centre. There's also Lavender Fields on Langley Road, round the corner from Sutton, with another scheme nearby on the same road. And the Moss Rose, Macclesfield FC's ground, is a short way down the road from Lyme Green and sits on the edge of the Moss Lane estate — it gets busy on match days, and that's the same stretch of road the new housing feeds onto. Sutton itself is being closed in from more than one direction — Gaw End Lane and Lyme Green on one side, Langley Road on the other, and now a potential site on Bullocks Lane. That's before whatever comes out of this process — the call for sites has put a number of further sites around Macclesfield on the map, of which the field off Bullocks Lane is only one. Each of those will have been judged acceptable at the time, and no single one of them broke anything. That's how a road ends up carrying more than it can take — one estate at a time, with nothing improved in between, and no single application ever being the one that's obviously too much. Whatever gets looked at near here should be looked at alongside all of that, not on its own.
(REDACTED) Bredbury in Stockport and still drive over regularly. It's a different council and a different plan, so I'm not offering it as evidence about Cheshire East, but it's where I've watched this happen.
Bredbury has one main road through it, the A560, carrying traffic towards Stockport in one direction and into Tameside — on towards Hyde and Ashton — in the other, while also feeding the M60. It has several bottlenecks and it isn't wide enough for what it already carries — at rush hour there are long queues along it, often at a standstill. There's also a large supermarket sitting in the middle of it, generating traffic of its own. Added along it over the years:
• A drive-through McDonald's, then a drive-through Costa, with a third drive-through proposed near Bents Lane
• Two housing estates near Bredbury station
• Apartments in Woodley with another estate approved nearby
• A large retail unit on the supermarket site that has been numerous different stores over the years and continues to generate business interest.
And there is more planned on top of that. The road has been resurfaced and re-marked in that time. The junctions and the capacity haven't changed.
Nobody set out to make Bredbury like that. It happened one approval at a time, each one reasonable enough on its own, with nothing standing back to ask what the road could actually take. That's the direction I think Macclesfield is heading.
I've since looked this up. Stockport hasn't had an adopted local plan since 2011, and its five year housing land supply stood at 1.77 years as of early 2025. I'm glad that Cheshire East is engaging with residents on this local plan as I would not like to see more and more green belt land taken up for housing development because the council cannot demonstrate the five year supply and developers can win on appeal. I would however sooner see this plan done properly and adopted than delayed — because without a plan nobody gets asked these questions at all.
That's what sits behind everything above, and it comes down to one ask. Before housing is agreed anywhere around here, I'd like someone to have properly checked that the roads, the schools, the GP surgeries and the buses can take it — counting what has already been built nearby, rather than assessing the site as though it were the first — and to have published what they found, so residents can see the working.
I don't mean a commitment that it will be looked at, or a condition to be sorted out later. What I've watched happen is houses going up first and everything else expected to catch up afterwards. Mostly it doesn't. Once an estate is built, the bridge is still the same width and the surgery still has the same number of appointments.
So I ask that the evidence comes before the decision rather than after it, and that it's published rather than just done internally. If a site genuinely has the capacity around it, that should be straightforward to show. If it hasn't, that's exactly the sort of thing a plan like this ought to be catching now, while there's still time to do something about it.
One last thing, on how you run the consultation. I'm writing this email rather than using the online form because the form splits things up section by section, and what I wanted to say doesn't divide up that way — roads, buses and where houses go are one thing to the person living with them. It would help if there were an obvious way to send a single response. I'd also say plainly on the website that sites aren't being decided at this stage. Several people I've spoken to think they are.
