It’s worth posting a few thoughts about last night’s meeting at St Faith’s Church.
Firstly, it was great to see that the HBC Regeneration team took a leaf out of the HCS playbook and booked the best community venue in town. Thanks, as always, to ‘Canon Tom’ for his ever-welcome commitment to the use of this fine building for local community purposes.
The occasion was Havant Borough Council’s public meeting to introduce Hughes & Salvidge as the demolition team contracted to take down the Bulbeck Road car park, starting 9 September. To view the Council’s slideshow, please click the image below.
Wayne Layton made a commendable effort n his introduction to placate that half of the audience who had clearly come to complain about the continued lack of action on a residents’ parking scheme, highlighted in our report of the previous meeting.
The need for such a scheme is obvious and Wayne conceded that point, though warned the audience that with twenty years’ experience of Portsmouth City Council, the only subject that regularly drew public audiences to Council meetings was the discussion of residents’ parking schemes. The point was well made and understood by those present, although we would suggest that Havant’s parking issues should be more straight-forward to solve.
The Hughes & Salvidge presentation was well made and well received. As a local company known to many, they already know the town. Concerns raised about out-of-hours security and anti-social behaviour were answered with experience from the company’s recent felling of the tower blocks at Somerstown in Portsmouth. Concerns that HGV traffic in and out of the Park Road South site would be causing holdups by crossing the traffic flow were answered with the encouraging news that this part of the job will be performed by ‘Lift and Shift’, more formally known as ‘L&S Waste Management’. Another local company which also knows Havant’s traffic issues well from its base on Portsdown Hill.
When asked, by a member of the community rather than by the usual old HCS bore, whether the noise and vibration might be as bad as that experienced at the Amazon site, the tongue-in-cheek response by H&S reminded those present that the Pfizer demolition job had been awarded to another company.
And so the meeting turned to the topic of ‘Residents’ Parking’. It’s an old issue which refuses to die and one which is repeatedly made worse by poorly-defined development projects. McCormack House was unsurprisingly name-checked given that the latest Transport Assessment suggests that the school staff should alleviate the obvious issues of student drop-off and pick-up by ‘parking in the local streets’. That’s a detail that has already proved to be a red rag to nearby residents!
It was at this point that Wayne, not for the first time in the meeting, suggested somewhat unfairly that complaints should be levelled at Hampshire County Councillor, Lulu Bowerman, who was herself unavailable to the meeting. Unfair because long experience tells us all that any attempt to get Hampshire County Council engaged with the local community on local matters will fall on deaf ears, even when raised through the elected County councillors.
In matters of traffic and parking, there is a long history of disconnection from local reality demonstrated by HCC officers. It was, after all, the very same elected councillors who had failed to understand, and failed to communicate to the County’s officers, the sheer and utter stupidity of siting Amazon in the middle of the town where it would cause maximum impact on the Park Road North and South traffic issues.
It’s genuinely refreshing to see HBC officers engaging openly with the community, and Wayne had brought two of his team along to this out-of-hours meeting. Lyall Cairns and his Coastal Partners team have set a fine example for face-to-face community engagement, and Wayne Layton and Alex Robinson are not far behind.
The problem, and it’s one which needs fixing with some urgency at the Chief Exec level, is that community meetings such as these should also include representation by an appropriate officer delegated by the County authority. Havant Borough Council officers are already going that extra mile and it’s high time that the County stepped up to the task.
Rather than pointlessly expensive and unproductive ‘upgrades’ like the extended third lane into the Langstone Roundabout or the 300 metres of cycle lane on Elmleigh Road, the town needs some serious traffic and parking attention from the County.
Havant Civic Society 