LISTENING to the emotive arguments from police and ambulance representatives in favour of their helicopters, hangar, fuel bunker and thirty three parking spaces taking root in our vital greenbelt fields hard by the treacherous M4/M5interchange, one word comes to mind - Sustainability.

It is more sustainable to build this base on the airfield alongside the A38 where it has functioned perfectly well until now.

Moving the base close to the already congested J16 approach at Almondsbury, thereby enabling planners to pack more tenements and townhouses on the Filton site will do little to answer the housing needs of Yate ,Thornbury, Almondsbury or Bradley Stoke.

The tide is to move out of the city not into it. So we will be largely accommodating Bristol overspill not South Gloucestershire needs. Another 2500 houses have just been given the nod leaving us in these parts still facing genuine unanswered concerns about schools, surgeries, nurseries,and burial grounds receiving no priority at the head of this building programme.

Above all everything is serviced by the unsustainable, shamefully inadequate road system. A so-called Bristol ring road which hits the buffers at Filton roundabout; a Victorian railway bridge in Gypsy Patch Lane; the A38 conveniently stacking traffic back to Rudgeway and taking the strain of diversions when the M5 is closed by accident.

And dear old Junction 16 the only motorway junction in these parts which does what it says on the tin, giving full north/south, east/west direct access to commercial traffic. Our planners answer is a metro bus. Can they be serious!

The heliport should remain at Filton, alongside the A38, between Rolls-Royce and BAE . As they prepare to nail down Concorde in a glass coffin it will be a reminder that these companies contribute to things that really fly and are not just another 'component maker'.

It will improve the openness and relieve the pressure on services that these extra dwellings would otherwise generate. Above all, to those who live in some of these grim flats, this green open space will afford something interesting to look at and even make them proud to overlook.

Wendy Roberts

Over Lane

Almondsbury