I PITY the residents of Malton. They seem to get no choice whatsoever in what is built in their town.

Ryedale District Council has decided that it will sell Wentworth Street car park to a superstore developer. Did anybody ask the townspeople if they wanted anything else there instead?

Couldn’t that car park have fulfilled a lot of Malton’s housing needs, without good foodproducing land having to be built on, and wouldn’t the new residents have become part of the town, instead of semi-suburban dwellers?

And now the two branches of the Fitzwilliam Estate seem to have created some sort of an alliance to complete a massive building program on land surrounding the town.

Apparently, it is all because one branch wants to provide the area’s livestock farmers with a new market.

Very commendable. Trouble is, it is the other branch that made them homeless in the first place.

Anyway, the new auction market has to be paid for somehow, so units for agri-businesses will also need to be built.

The agri-business units need to be paid for as well, so an industrial estate will be built next door.

However, the industrial estate will have to be paid for, so a few hundred houses will be built on fields surrounding the town to do so – all essential, Maltonians are being told, to pay for the auction market move.

Hang on a minute. Fitzwilliam Estate and the Fitzwilliam Trust Corporation are not short of a bob or two. We’re not talking Michael Marks being lent five quid to start a stall on Leeds market so that he could scrimp and save his way to the Marks and Spencers chain of superstores.

The Fitzwilliams are extremely wealthy companies with massive land and property holdings, including most of Malton. They do not need to bury hundreds of acres under tarmacadam to fund a new cattle market.

They do need to give their tenants and neighbours in the town a choice, though.

They especially need to give the people of Old Malton a choice. They need to ask them if they are happy that all the water draining off a 45-acre development will not make their flooding problems any worse.

They need to ask them if they are happy with the phrase, “The existing sewers are located 250 metres to the south and are public sewers owned and maintained by Yorkshire Water, therefore flooding from these sewers is deemed low risk”.

Bearing in mind what happened to the sewers in Old Malton in 2005, 2007, 2009 and 2012, are the residents of Old Malton confident that the Fitzwilliams’ developers know what they are talking about? Or do they have no say in the matter anyway?

If Malton’s residents were given any choice in all this, it was whether they either went for the council package, which was the Wentworth superstore, or the Fitzwilliam one, with its redeveloped town centre, but including nearly 300 out-of-town houses and a huge industrial estate draining into a residential area that already has serious flooding problems.

Eden Blyth, Wrelton, Pickering