Most people in Macclesfield – and beyond – have warmly welcomed the announcement last month that Cheshire East Council has withdrawn plans to build 950 houses and a major road on northern Danes Moss. A richly diverse wooded wetland, much-loved by local residents and a habitat to many species such as the endangered willow warbler and rare varieties of butterflies, toads and bats, the Moss is also a major reserve of peat, vital for combatting climate change by keeping excess carbon dioxide out of our atmosphere.
With local politicians queuing up to tell us how much they’re against the scheme, you’d wonder how it ever got off the ground in the first place. Let’s just remember, it was the previous Conservative administration that designated northern Danes Moss as a “Development Area” and the present Labour-led council, alongside the developer, that pushed through the plans, arguing that they were “carbon-neutral”, with astonishing statements like “the peat is already dead”! Only the Greens have consistently opposed development of the site from the start.
Having already wasted three and a quarter million pounds of our money on this scheme (as they wasted £12 million trying to persuade us that HS2 would have been good for Cheshire East), the council now wants to throw good money after bad, paying consultants £150,000 to “review options”. They apparently want to save face by building at least a few houses on the Moss.
Instead, they should sit down with local residents, campaigners, ecologists and conservation bodies like the Cheshire Wildlife Trust and the RSPB, to plan how to preserve and enhance the Moss as an asset to the community, wildlife and the environment. Cheshire East Council says they want the borough to be carbon neutral by 2045 – let’s see them put that into practice.
Column published in the Macclesfield Express in June 2025