Looking back at 2024
We began last year with a newly established Havant Borough Council executive team in place. After five years of stagnation, characterised by a lack of engagement from the previous East Hants District Council executive team and a tired elected council that appeared to rubber-stamp, unchallenged, questionable initiatives by its cabinet, the future of the borough looked to be in good hands. Havant had regained the ability and the will to shape the future of the borough through its own independent ‘voice’ at Hampshire County Council.
At the Society’s public meeting held in March, we introduced two members of the new HBC executive team to the audience and between them, Wayne Layton and Alex Robinson demonstrated a refreshingly open attitude to public engagement.
The local elections in May delivered an open, broad-based elected council under the leadership of Phil Munday. The long-standing issues with inadequately validated planning applications might now be kept in check by the long-overdue appointment of a Planning Committee with cross-party membership committed to open challenge and debate.
By the end of the year, Wayne Layton’s pragmatic approach to Regeneration had delivered greater tangible progress on town centre regeneration across the borough than his predecessors had since we began reporting on the subject in 2018. The demolition of the Bulbeck Road car park and November’s announcement of the sale of the site to Churchill Homes, for ‘later living’ apartments, wrapped up a promising year.
One outstanding issue remains relating to the springs which were known to exist beneath the site. A previously capped spring was found during demolition, along with another which was still open and flowing. In accordance with the site sale agreement, the council must divert and cap the newly found spring to fully prepare the land for development before the sale can be completed.
Devolution and Local Government Reorganisation
You may have missed the HBC announcements regarding the impact of devolution on Havant Borough, but you may well have seen news articles in the national press about this, including the typically blunt words on the subject from Cllr. Steve Pitt, leader of Portsmouth City Council. Do not assume that because you’ve heard nothing from your local council leadership, this doesn’t apply to you. It does, and the consequences are significant and wide ranging as we’ll discuss in a separate HCS post.
At the very end of the year however, everything was thrown up in the air by the government’s publication of the English Devolution White Paper on 16 December, which required action by all local authorities across the country by 10 January. The dust has yet to settle but it is already clear that a wholesale reorganisation of local government is on the cards with wide ranging impacts on the current local representative bodies, their staff and the elected representatives who do their best to support us.
HBC Planning Services is leaderless, once again
You may also have missed the formal announcement of the departure of Alex Robinson, the Executive Head of Place , from Havant Borough Council’s executive team. We would have done also had we not spotted the job advertisement for an Executive Head of Planning & Regulatory Services on social media.
We had at first considered that Alex Robinson’s move back to Hertfordshire could be coincidence, rather than a consequence of the devolution initiative. However, having watched the Hampshire County Council meeting from 9 January, it’s clear that the two councils have been locked in discussions on the future of local government since the middle of 2023 so that would undoubtedly have influenced his decision.
It is disappointing to see the executive head of planning give up and bail out after less than two years in post. Despite showing promise at the beginning of his brief tenure by focusing more on planning enforcement, Alex had made little headway on the enforcement of planning conditions applicable to some of the more troubled development projects that he had inherited. More disappointingly, he had left unchallenged the serious issues within the planning application validation process which have been a root cause of these troubled projects.
In the current uncertain climate of devolution, we’re unlikely to see a permanent and committed replacement for the foreseeable future. Having had three ‘heads of Planning’ in as many years, with the devolution process now in motion and no Local Plan in place, the town’s situation on planning and enforcement matters is likely to deteriorate still further
(A separate dedicate post on the impact of ‘Devolution and Local Government Reorganisation’ can be found by clicking this link.)
Havant Civic Society 