The draft Local Plan ‘Building a Better Future’ is open for consultation until 1 July

The first full draft of the Havant Borough Local Plan, subtitled ‘Building a Better Future’, is currently out for public consultation until 23:45 on 1 July 2025.

For those of us who live in or near the St Faith’s Conservation Area, the opportunity also includes consultation on the St Faith’s Conservation Area Appraisal and Management Plan. For those living in Waterlooville, there is an opportunity to comment on the Waterlooville Town Centre Masterplan.

Now’s the time to have your say!

To go straight to the Havant Borough Council web page which covers the consultation, please take this link.

Alternatively, stick with us and we’ll give you a little background to the documents, their importance to the borough and why we think you should take the time to read them. This consultation is one of the few opportunities for engagement with the local plan development that you’ll have.

The Local Plan Documents

The following sections of this post can be accessed directly by clicking on the item in the following list:

1. The Local Plan Delivery Timeline
2. The Local Plan Brochure
3. The Site Allocations Map
4. The Local Plan Detail
5. The St Faith’s Conservation Area Appraisal and Management Plan
6. The draft Waterlooville Town Centre Masterplan
7. Meet the Council Local Plan team face-to-face
8. How to respond to this Consultation
9. Editorial comment: Why is this important?

The Local Plan Delivery Timeline

The Local Plan Brochure

The Site Allocations Map

This is a useful single page document which introduces the proposed sites to be allocated for development.

The Local Plan Detail

The document is made up of a preface and four main sections. The Table of Contents contains ‘hot links’ to the detail at an ‘allocation’ and ‘policy’ level which is helpful, though be aware that while the main section headings appear clickable in some browsers, they actually click through to the first subsection which sometimes gives a confusing impression.

Section 1 – Introduction

Section 1 contains an introduction to the document.

This section documents the history of the Building a Better Future plan to date, provides a summary history of Havant Borough and highlights the Challenges and Opportunities facing the borough, depicted in a set of simple presentation graphics.

Section 2 – Vision and the Development Strategy and Implementation

Section 2 sets out the planning policies which underpin the Vision and Strategic aspirations.

Spatial Strategy
Defined Urban Areas
Regeneration
Infrastructure and Environmental Mitigation to Support Development
Amount of Housing Amount of Employment
Five Year Housing Land Supply
Health and Climate Change
New Homes for Sustainable Communities
Supporting a Strong and Prosperous Economy
The Role of Applicants and the Local Planning Authority in Delivering Development

Section 3 – Development Allocations

Section 3 sets out the detail for the Development Allocations shown on the site allocations map.

Many of sites allocated for housing and employment will be well known to regular readers of the HCS blog, and our previous commentary on them can be followed by taking the links against the sites listed below:

Site 1 – Southleigh
Site 5 – Southleigh Park House
Site 6 – Land East of Castle Avenue
Site 7 – Former Oak Park School
Site 8 – Palk Road
Site 10 – South of Lower Road Phase 2
Site 11 – Kingscroft Farm
Site 12 – Portsmouth Water HQ site
Site 13 – Cabbagefield Row
Site 15 – Land west of Hulbert Road
Site 18 – Former Electricity Board, Bartons Road
Site 25 – Campdown
Site 27 – Dunsbury Park Strategic Site
Site 28 – Former Colt Site
Site 29 – Gas Holder site – New Lane
Site 30 – Langstone Park

Section 4 – Delivering Sustainable Development in Havant Borough

Section 4 sets out the remainder of the Planning Policies under the following group headings.

High Quality Development
Climate Change
The Natural Environment
Flood Risk and the Coast
Heritage and Landscape
Homes for All
The Borough’s Economy and Town Centres
Amenity and Pollution
Infrastructure

The St Faith’s Conservation Area Appraisal and Management Plan

The draft Waterlooville Town Centre Masterplan

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Meet the Council Local Plan team face-to-face

The council is running a series of exhibition events around the borough for anyone to learn more about the Plan, ask the officers questions and provide your feedback on the proposals:

Saturday 24 May 2025 – Meridian Centre, Havant, 10am to 4pm 
Wednesday 28 May 2025 – Greywell Centre, Leigh Park, 10am to 2pm 
Thursday 29 May 2025 – Greywell Centre, Leigh Park, 10am to 2pm 
Monday 2 June 2025 – Hayling Island Community Centre, 3pm to 7pm 
Thursday 12 June 2025 – The Spring, Havant, 10am to 2pm 
Thursday 19 June 2025 – Public Service Plaza, Havant, 10am to 4pm 
Saturday 21 June 2025 – St. George’s Church Hall, Waterlooville, 10am to 4pm 

How to respond to this Consultation

The Council has provided three ways that you can respond to the ‘Building a Better Future’ draft Local Plan.

Option 1 – Use the online survey form

The use of a simple third-party survey tool with little or no validation built in lowers the value of the responses received, putting the emphasis on quantity rather than quality. By comparison, public comments on planning applications require validation at the individual respondent level and management under the Council’s data privacy controls and its registered interests.

Respond on a paper copy of the survey

Paper surveys are available for collection from all libraries in Havant and the community centres listed below. These are available to collect with a pre-paid envelope so can return your response free of charge. 

Westbrook Hall, Waterlooville
The Acorn Centre, Wecock Farm
Bedhampton Community Centre
Cowplain Activity Centre
Emsworth Community Centre
Hayling Island Community Centre
Leigh Park Community Centre
The Pallant Centre, Havant
Springwood Community Centre, Waterlooville
The Stride Centre, Denvilles
Waterlooville Community Centre

Respond by submitting a document

If you wish to spend more time writing a more detailed response on specific aspects of the draft local plan, we suggest that you set these down in a document referencing the relevant proposed policies numbers and site allocations numbers. If you have access to email, then you can submit it by email to this address, or send by post to:

Local Plan Consultation Response
Havant Borough Council
Public Service Plaza
Civic Centre Road
Havant
PO9 2AX

Editorial comment: Why is this important?

A well-structured local plan ensures sustainable growth, balancing development with community needs.

It is now many years since Havant Borough Council has created a Local Plan which has received approval from central government. The reasons are complex, but the underlying problem has been the Council’s failure to listen to, and learn from, the local community it serves. Without an approved local plan, the Havant Borough communities face several serious challenges:

Uncontrolled Development: There is less control over where and when development happens, leading to speculative and unplanned growth.

Strain on Infrastructure: Essential services like roads, schools, and healthcare facilities may not be adequately planned or funded.

Housing Issues: The absence of a structured plan can result in either excessive or insufficient housing development, affecting affordability and availability.

Economic Consequences: Delays in local plan-making can lead to lost economic opportunities, including jobs and investment in construction and related industries.

Environmental Concerns: Without strategic planning, green spaces and conservation areas may be at risk from unchecked development.

There is a high volume of detail in the 350 page detailed ‘Building a Better Future’ document, but if you’re familiar with previous iterations of the draft Local Plan, from which the bulk of the content appears to have been reused, you might be forgiven for asking why it took three years to get to this point?

There are certainly additions and amendments which reflect the changing emphasis on climate change, with its consequent influence on energy and flood risk, but these are offset by the removal of some of the more controversial development allocations for Hayling Island.

The inclusion of a fourth theme, seemingly added as an afterthought, highlights Havant Borough Council’s effort to prevent a repeat of the previous Local Plan’s shortcomings. That earlier plan failed to satisfy the Planning Inspector due to the Council’s inability to comply with its own Statement of Community Involvement (SCI).

Confusingly, the use of the term “theme” is inconsistent with its use a few pages earlier in the Introduction, where the reader encounters not three or four, but five quite different ‘themes’. However, the Council is clearly so confident that its consultation on the ‘Building a Better Future’ Local Plan will not suffer a similar fate to its predecessor, that the following statement is prominently displayed within the ‘Theme 4’ detail on page 24.

“Consultation is taking place on the Draft Building a Better Future Plan which is considered to exceed [the requirements of] the Statement of Community Involvement and the Council’s Engagement Strategy.”

We will be exploring the Statement of Community Involvement in a forthcoming HCS blog post.

Councillor Munday’s forward to the ‘Building a Better Future’ states that “At the time of writing this foreword (January 2025), the plan is still taking shape and public consultation and engagement has yet to take place.” This sets a rather misleading tone given that the project is now well into its fourth year on the timeline shown earlier in this post.

On 28 July, 2022, already seven months into that schedule, the Local Plan team held a day of consultation, meeting prospective developers and applicants in the morning, followed in the afternoon by a round table meeting with representatives of the twelve community groups which then made up the Havant Borough Residents’ Alliance.

You can read the questions raised by the community groups, but sadly not the responses received, by clicking the image below.

It’s a sad reflection on the inadequacy of engagement with the planning process in Havant Borough that at least three of the residents’ groups represented at that meeting have since ceased to function. The frustration of being unheard, coupled with the broader decline in public trust in local democracy, has made it increasingly difficult to find individuals willing to take on the demanding work of the planning representatives in these local voluntary organisations.

It’s worth noting the view of the Local Government Association that:

“Consultation is technically any activity that gives local people a voice and an opportunity to influence important decisions. It involves listening to and learning from local people before decisions are made or priorities are set.”

The residents’ genuine offer to engage constructively with the development of the Local Plan three years ago was simply ignored. In the intervening years, we strongly suspect that the local landowners, the potential planning applicants, their developers and their planning consultants have been regularly engaged throughout.

The residents, however, all of whom are personally invested in the future of the Borough and many of whom, incidentally, are well-placed to cope with basic proofreading, appear to be viewed as second class stakeholders.

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