AS a Guarlford parish councillor, I totally agree with last week’s letter asking why the Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty’s voice has not been heard in the South Worcestershire Development Plan’s sell-out to developers.

Does the ANOB even have a voice?

If it does, it is a singularly quiet and ineffective one.

Malvern’s most precious asset, not just the hills themselves but the views from the hills, as Charles Eden says, should be the highest priority for the ANOB and, I would add, the hills’ other supposed guardians, the Conservators.

Yet we heard little or nothing of any consequence from either organisation as the Conservative majority rammed through their notorious “Preferred Option” last year – otherwise known as “Son of Joint Core Strategy”.

So-called “consultation” in relation to the SWDP was a mockery from beginning to end.

Planners, councillors and the developers themselves conspired to treat the outcome as a foregone conclusion from the very first – which it was.

With only a few honourable exceptions, most councillors kept their heads down when the council’s leader and his deputy repeatedly said there would be a developer free-for-all if they did not toe the party line and vote for the SWDP.

What hope, though, for Malvern when ANOB and Conservators’ voices are mute in this unusually blessed landscape of ours?

ERIC JONES Guarlford