I was at the meeting called by residents to hear the planning officer and the headmaster of Cardinal Newman School explain the planned development of BHASVIC playing field (The Argus, July 14) .

For the more than 90 people crammed into the hall it was, unfortunately, as we feared. The plans will destroy a grass playing field and bring noise and light pollution into our community seven days a week.

Some interesting points arose. For instance, this application, which will affect the whole community, legally needed only one notice on a lamp-post a long way from both the field itself and the people who use it after school hours.

So much for open government. Next, while Brighton and Hove City Council has a policy of protecting open spaces, in the council officer's view, hard-surfacing one third of a field will not affect the environment at all.

So presumably we could concrete the Downs and, as long as they were painted green, it would be okay.

This field was originally part of the boys' grammar school, whose buildings and grounds were taken over by BHASVIC. It has, therefore, always been referred to as BHASVIC field.

We were informed by Cardinal Newman School's headmaster that in fact East Sussex County Council passed ownership of 90 per cent of the field on to his school.

Why it should do such a thing I can't imagine, especially as his school is grant-maintained and had so much ground that, with Cottesmore, it sold its infant school (with playground) and a field for housing. We were unable to discover how much was paid for such valuable public assets.

I understood the headmaster to say Stanford Junior School used the BHASVIC field only with his permission.

The school has no green space of its own so the amount of field available to it will be very much reduced and, if they should want to use the hockey pitches, they would have to pay.

-J Hales, Hove