The admirable group of ­dedicated enthusiasts who are currently promoting the ­preservation of the community orchard need to be careful not to distort the truth for the sake of publicity.

Friends of the Orchard spokesman Peter Goldstraw, in an opinion piece on April 28, succeeds in giving readers the impression that the majority of town councillors are hostile towards what the group is doing. They are not. In fact, they continue to give the group generous support.

So it is disturbing to hear reports that people are being encouraged to sign a petition in response to dire warnings of supposed councillor malevolence towards a valuable public asset.

How that asset is to be used will undoubtedly feature in the neighbourhood plan, but any alteration proposed is unlikely to affect the orchard’s ­dominant long-term role as part of the network of green spaces available to the town.

For example, the suggestion of building some affordable housing on one site only needs to affect a small area of orchard land that used to be built on anyway.

Mr Goldstraw is right to say that community involvement

is the key to successful neighbourhood planning. Single-issue pressure groups have

a useful part to play in this ­process.

But a plan has to reconcile competing interests and ­viewpoints, most of them valid to some degree.

To claim that the town ­council does not appreciate fully the importance of ­community engagement is ­nonsense, as the long history of collaboration and support between the council and ­numerous bodies, including the orchard group, clearly shows.

In the end, one plan must engage with all the interests pressing for attention, inevitably involving building consensus in place of disagreement. Compromise is the ­hardest thing for any campaigners to accept, but it can serve their purposes if it leads to an adopted neighbourhood plan giving fair support to their ­central concerns.

Cllr Tony Fyson

Above Town

Dartmouth