Advance notice of an HCS Public Forum to be held in late March 2025
We’re pleased to report that Havant Borough Council’s Chief Executive, Steve Jorden, and Cllr. Phil Munday, the elected Leader of the Council, will be joining the HCS Committee at a Public Forum which we are planning to hold at St. Faith’s Church in the centre of Havant.
We have invited Steve and Phil to share as much as they can about the current English Devolution process and how support for residents of the current Borough of Havant will migrate to a new unitary authority in 2027.
As soon as we have a firm date, we will provide details and an agenda. We will also provide a form through which you can submit questions which you’d like answered. There will be time towards the end of the agenda for questions from the audience, but to make the best of the opportunity we’d welcome your input ahead of the meeting to structure the session.
The ‘new’ Havant Borough Council ‘Draft Local Plan’
This week’s Havant Borough Council Overview and Scrutiny Meeting, covered in the rest of this article, generated the first obvious question for the upcoming public forum:
“The Local Plan is scheduled to be submitted to the Secretary of State in the second quarter of 2027. Havant Borough Council is due to be subsumed into a unitary authority in the second quarter of 2027. How is that going to work?”
On Thursday 6 February 2024, the Council’s Overview and Scrutiny Committee met to review the first draft of the new Havant Borough Local Plan, entitled ‘Building a Better Future’. The papers for this meeting include the first public appearance of the 400-odd pages of output from almost three elapsed years of effort by HBC planning officers.
You can take a look at this draft yourself by clicking this link, which will open the meeting papers in a separate browser tab. (Scroll forward to Page 31 to find the start of the draft Local Plan.)
Alternatively, sit back and watch the proceedings at the HCS YouTube link below. The recording starts with Cllr. Munday’s introduction as the Leader of the Council, before proceeding to the presentation by the Local Plan team lead, David Hayward, HBC Planning Policy Manager. Comments are then invited from the members of the Overview and Scrutiny committee, which are well worth listening to.
| Video Link | Meeting topic |
|---|---|
| Introduction | Cllr. Phil Munday introduces Local Plan draft, following the Chair’s introduction to the meeting. |
| Notes from HBC Exec | Introductory notes by Alex Robinson, HBC Director of Place |
| Presentation of the plan | Introduction by David Hayward, assisted by the Local Plan team |
| Written Question from Cllr. Sharon Collings | A written question (which you can read at this link) received and answered prior to the meeting. |
| Commentary on written question and response | Cllr. Munday makes an additional response to the meeting, to clarify Cllr. Colling’s written question. Alex Robinson then steps in to add to the ‘question’. |
| Questions on the Local Plan | Worth listening to this full section. Notable contributions from Cllr. Jason Horton and a particularly entertaining comment – or was it a question? – raised by a justifiably exasperated Cllr. David Keast. Cllr. Collings notes that Warblington footbridge appears to be back in the plan. Cllr. Horton raises an excellent point about how the Local Plan team propose to engage with residents with ‘lower literacy levels’. |
| “Engagement with people” | Cllr. Munday reinforces the importance of engagement with local people. Fine words, but note the comments |
| Cllr. Brent raises the Devolution question. | Since it hadn’t been included on the presentation as ‘a risk’, one assumes that the officers were hoping to avoid this! |
| Questioning continues… | Cllr. Brent questions the ‘target response’ for the Local Plan consultation |
| The Chair invites Cllr. Grainne Rason to address the meeting | Cllr. Rason, taking the lead for her Emsworth Ward on environmental matters and nitrate neutrality, had already taken up the long-running cause of Long Copse Lane with the Leader and with the Planning team ahead of the meeting with, it appears, some level of agreement from those parties that Emsworth development sites should be treated as a special case. An interesting discussion follows, sparked by Cllr. Peter Oliver, presumably with Langstone and Hayling in mind and picked up by Cllr. Brent, concerned that all wards should be treated equally. We suspect that this is just a hint of some of the difficult discussions to come as the Borough once known as Havant fights its corner against, say Gosport and Portchester, for priority attention at the likely Greater Portsmouth unitary authority to come. |
| The debate, and the vote | Cllr. Collings raises the even more contentious case of the Emsworth Gap, but falls foul of the Chair’s ‘when is a comment not a question’ rule. (It would probably have been better to set aside the ‘local democratic officer rule book’ for this meeting to simply allow greater freedom of expression. |
| Cllr Keast on ‘Quality of design’ | Cllr. Keast raises a cracker of a point on design standards. A point which has been raised time and time again, but which never seems to gain traction with the officers. It is to be hoped that the new Director of Place to be appointed effective 1 March will actually shake the department up a bit. The need is great and with this kick-off for the last Local Plan of the Havant Borough Council era, it could be a case of ‘better late than never’. |
Where did the last three years go?
Regular readers will recall our first report on the ‘Building a Better Future’ project, which covered the meeting on 28 July 2022 between David Hayward and representatives of members of the Havant Borough Residents’ Alliance, including Havant Civic Society.
Our report was published two months later, on receipt of the Council’s responses to the questions which had been raised by the residents in advance of the meeting. The questions documented remain valid today, with this document and the responses given representing the earliest evidence of Community Involvement in the Building a Better Future project. For full detail, read the following contemporary post:
Havant Local Plan – ‘Building a Better Future’? – Havant Civic Society
This was not an auspicious start to an exercise which depends on ‘Community Involvement’ to achieve a more successful outcome that its predecessor. The last attempt at submitting a Local Plan having met with a thumbs down from the Planning Inspector in 2021, and so it’s worth reading his report and listening to the highlights of his comments at the ‘Examination in Public’ in the following HCS report:
Stop Press ‘The Local Plan’: The Planning Inspector has spoken – Havant Civic Society
Little has been seen from the officers in the intervening years, apart from the publication in May 2023 of the development sites submitted for consideration by the usual suspects. You can read our review here:
Development sites submitted for consideration in the Local Plan – Havant Civic Society
On first glance
You’d be forgiven for questioning what the planning team have actually been doing since the project was launched in July 2022. Much of the content of the new plan appears to have been cut-and-pasted from the previous unsuccessful document.
Even the Warblington pedestrian footbridge makes a return, as the eagle-eyed Cllr. Collings had noted.
Havant Civic Society 