So I too have looked at the scheme and then the one application Twiscob Top. My first thoughts are that every Solicitor in the UK needs to warn their clients about this scheme so people can decide if they want to invest in Wales and take the risk of this type of development next door. How can this be done?

My second alarm is that what you have is a cheap form of unregulated development in green belt something unheard of anywhere else in the UK. The Applicant can self-certify they are on plan to maintain their status. Someone, please tell me anywhere else this can happen in planning or indeed anything else important in life?

If I have a new chicken farm next door putting up a building of a reasonable size but before they finish the build they get a new order and double the size of it can they? Has one law under one scheme changed the rights of others under another? Both are making a living off the land.

I’ve then looked at Twiscob Top planning permission. They have five years before they need to start. What’s happening until they do get going do the OPD’s all get social support?

Never in all my years have I seen houses as these people live in why do I have to fit in with a style of home in my area, and yet they can build the weirdest of buildings? Do they add to the long-term resilience of what makes us Welsh – well I would like to hear the opinions of some well-known designers? So why can’t I do what I want now has this been tested through the courts?

Then I looked at them as a family and hadn’t heard of home education so read an excellent report on the BBC. Many parents seem to do this where the children have mental health and exclusion problems. Yet councils want more monitoring powers, how will they do this in practical terms on these sites? Is this common to OPD parenting? What are we storing up here as a country tell me? Our education is already below other nations. Are we encouraging the isolation of problem families and preparing children to become social misfits?

Where is all the money coming from – land isn’t cheap, Twiscob Top seem to have more money for their property than my daughter has for a deposit on her house which has taken her fifteen years to get together as a nurse and she then has a thirty-year mortgage. What message are we giving our children and the key workers we need?

Life in Wales often doesn’t seem fair as it is, what are we trying to tell society on our priorities and who and what is valued ?

Finally, I’m confused what MP’s are talking and doing anything about this scheme?

It’s sad that the marketisation of higher education under the Tories in the 1979 to 1997 period, and Blair’s completely daft idea, plucked from goodness knows where of 50% of all secondary school leavers going on to higher education have brought us to the current situation where there is a surplus of places and diminishing demand.

Whatever was wrong with the original notion of having a higher education system based on the idea that anyone being able to benefit from higher education being able to access it? Some might accuse the old regime as ‘elitist’ but isn’t that rather the point of higher education?

In all of this, we of course lost the University of Wales, as, one by one, Wales’ universities were seduced by the idea of becoming standalone universities issuing their own degrees. What was so wrong with University of Wales validated qualifications? There was that scandal a few years ago about the way in which some UW validated qualifications were being granted, but I suspect that the only guilt there was in actually being caught.

I suspect we’ll soon witness a substantial contraction of higher education in Wales, as there is a massive oversupply, with the various institutions, that have effectively been competing, having overstretched themselves. There is evidence that the University of South Wales campus in Newport city centre is virtually empty and unused. so this latest news about what is happening at Lampeter is worrying.

Most of these institutions may well have had, or have Management and Business Studies departments, but anyone who has had any experience of these departments will know that a substantial part of the business., (and yes it it a business) is in the very lucrative provision of qualifications to overseas students where standards applied aren’t always as they should be. This criticism isn’t so much the case with first degrees, but it is quite striking when you start to consider courses such as MBA courses where, in one institution to my knowledge, the vast majority of the students were from abroad and paying eye watering amounts for these courses in a pretty mediocre institution.

This institution also specialised in degree courses in Sports Mangement and Hospitality Management, not so much bad courses in themselves, but academic degree subjects? Surely this type of course would be better suited to an apprenticeship/sandwich course model combining real world experience and theory simultaneously providing practical work experience – a role for a polytechnic maybe?

perhaps a hacker could get into RAF planning system and slip in an instruction to get one of those heavily armed aircraft zooming around the Mach corridor to unload into Corris ! Just a thought.

Could hedge fund involvement be something to do with carbon offsetting? You buy land, plant trees, add up the CO2 they could theoretically absorb, then recoup the cost by selling ‘carbon credits’. These are bought by corporations that want to appear green but can’t because their business model involves burning huge amounts of fossil fuel, e.g. aviation or cement-making. It’s a bit like the medieval Church selling indulgences. It also means caring nothing about who suffers as a consequence. There have been reports of indigenous peoples being driven off rainforest land because it now belongs to corporations as part of their carbon offsetting portfolio and they demand total control of what goes on there, for the good of the planet you understand. Wales’ sheep should be very worried about George Monbiot.

They’re good at dictating to others, but it’s ‘Do as I say, not as I do’.

And yet, as I mention, Corris, which has been taken over by the buggers, sends up clouds of smoke from word-burning stoves, which they see as the height of eco-living.

It is symptomatic of a wider problem. And not all the hippy settlements that have sprung up without planning permission have bothered with OPD, but planners know from OPD and other ‘initiatives’ that they must be given retrospective planning permission and anything else they demand.

Especially given all the terrible things that are actually happening, such as school closures, bank closures and farm technology reducing the number of decent jobs.

Numbers are an issue because it not just a matter of OPD related projects alone but all the other embryonic pseudo businesses being helped along with a variety of Cynulliad agency grants and soft loans ( many of which will never be repaid). Your favourite sector, tourism/hospitality is probably one of the biggest culprits, soon to be overtaken by recreation and leisure where land hitherto freely accessible to the public will be ringfenced to allow assorted spivs to levy entrance fees and fine trespassers. Progress ? who says so ?