Havant Local Plan – ‘Building a Better Future’?

The project to develop Havant Borough Council’s new ‘Local Plan’ began in July and as a member of Havant Borough Residents’ Alliance (HBRA), HCS were invited to put questions to David Hayward, Planning Policy Manager, at a meeting chaired by Councillor Elizabeth Lloyd on July 28th. Questions from the twelve member groups of the HBRA were given to HBC ahead of the meeting and were recorded in a single document issued by HBRA to the HBC team immediately after the session for the record.

Also present at the meeting was the interim Head of Planning & Building Control, Simon Rowberry, a role which we understand has now been passed on to Neeru Kareer, the former Head of Strategic Planning & Design at Enfield Council who is, we understand, another interim appointment.

David Hayward, HBC Planning Policy Manager, presented a set of introductory slides which had earlier that day been presented to a similar meeting set up for the commercial Developer community.

Just over a month later, we received a copy of the slides presented to us at the meeting, together with a copy of our original ‘questions’ documented annotated with their responses. The covering email was quite explicit, and for reasons best known to the Council, we are unable to bring you either the presentation slides or the responses to our questions.

We can, however, bring you the questions which we asked, shown here with the redacted HBC responses to each one.

Make of this what you will.

It seems a rather strange way to begin a public consultation on the new Local Plan, particularly given the Planning Inspector’s comments when he rejected the previous attempt.