Tuesday 17th June - I'm afraid today's entry needs to be short because it's 10pm, the inquiry finished late and I've spent all night doing worthy and useful things that will ensure our presence at the inquiry is worthwhile.
Today was pretty much entirely devoted to habitats and by 4pm I was starting to feel quite sorry for the Trump witness who had really given it his best shot. In an introduction worthy of Monty Python we had an initial discussion about whether the SIN he had selected was the right SIN and if not why was his SIN different from other SINs? For those not entirely up on such things that's a Site of Interest to Natural Science and after a fair amount of huffing and puffing we all agreed that he'd used the wrong boundary and that a bigger one was better.
We talked about buckets and translocation for a while - turns out they'll need a lot of buckets (more than 114,000) to do what they want to do, and designing a new bucket is also apparently an option. All in all they need to relocate more than 35 hectares of habitat.
To be fair the witness said, more than once, that in his view the development should not be on the SSSI - this can't be an easy standpoint to stick to in these circumstances and perhaps explains why none of his colleagues would sit with him at lunch.
Another nice answer came from the final witness of the day on ecological issues. First he spent some considerable time outlining the many environmental benefits that would arise from the development such as bat boxes and bird boxes. However he agreed, when asked by Councillor Ford, that considering the profit and loss in terms of biodiversity from this site we are actually talking about taking something that is unique and irreplaceable (the dynamic dunes) and providing other things that, while valuable, are more widely distributed across the country.
It will perhaps not surprise you to note that audience figures hit a new low today - a grand total of 3 at one point.