HCS AGM and Public Meeting – September 26th 2018

We would like to thank all those who attended last night’s meeting at St Faith’s Church, with particular thanks to our guest speaker Tracey Viney from Portsmouth Water Company.

ReservoirTracey’s presentation on the Havant Thicket Winter Storage Reservoir project was of great interest. It’s a project which has been long in the planning and approvals stage but which is now gathering momentum.

For further details, click on the image and the project website will open in a new browser tab.

The full set of slides from the HCS part of the meeting can be viewed by taking this link.

Following the re-election of the Committee, our new roles for 2018-19, correctly aligned to our recently restored constitution, can be seen by taking the links under ‘About us’ in the main menu of the website.

The online survey issued before the meeting proved to be useful, with 35 respondents to date. Rather than immediately deleting the records, we will leave the survey open for a further week so if you’ve not taken the opportunity to have your say, the survey will be active at this link until the Wednesday, October 3rd.

If you don’t want to page through the full slide set, those relating to the first part of the survey can be viewed here.  Summaries of the free text entries under the “Which aspects of Havant have annoyed you most?” and “Which aspects of Havant have pleased you most?” questions, duly anonymised, can be viewed by taking those links.  There’s something for everyone in there, though sadly few surprises.

We draw your particular attention the section of the presentation, slides 20 to 24, which covers Ann Buckley’s update on the Havant Borough Local Plan to 2036.  Please read these carefully and take note of the meeting dates in your diaries.  We will be adding the dates to our What’s On calendar in due course.

In our summing up, we stressed the opportunity that Havant now has to be the town centre destination of choice for our rapidly expanding residential population. It’s now critical that Havant Borough Council grasp that opportunity.  The regeneration of the town centre ‘brown field’ sites, with the quality of development that Havant deserves, is long overdue.

We ran out of time last night before I could pass the following comment.

“I was born in Southsea, brought up in Portsmouth and moved to Havant in 1975.  In my childhood, there were always two depressing, dirty railway towns ‘up the line’, one being Havant, the other Petersfield.

Petersfield got its act together long ago and it’s high time that Havant did the same. Of those two railway towns, Havant’s potential is so much the greater.”

As we said last night, please take the time to contact your councillors and make your views known. If you don’t know who they are, you can find them here. Their postal and email addresses are clearly stated.

If you’re unhappy with the response, please let us know.

Thank you for your support.

Bob Comlay

Chairman