We visited the Bloor Homes event at the Stride Centre at lunchtime yesterday (Saturday) and were pleased to see the Stride Centre bustling with local folk. The potential developers had a good turnout for the Denvilles’ leg of their two-day event, with similar feedback heard from the previous day’s session at Emsworth Baptist Church.
For those unable to attend, the information boards can be downloaded by clicking the image below. If you’re using a tabbed browser, they’ll open in a separate tab. Do take the time to read them, zooming into the detail shown.
The first thing that might strike you is that the word ‘could’ is doing some seriously heavy lifting to enable those info-boards to score well on the marketing front, with all the essential buzzwords, including ‘sustainability’, ‘active travel’, and ‘the environment’, and talk that ‘the community could’ provide a GP practice, shops and community facilities.
Looked at through an environmental eye, given the destruction of such a large swathe of natural green space, the claim that they “will provide better quality habitat to encourage local wildlife to thrive” aiming “to go beyond the Government’s requirement for a 10% biodiversity net gain” looks a little unlikely. Doubtless the forthcoming planning application will justify that statement with a spreadsheet calculation based on the amount of ‘intensive farming area’ taken out of use.
To cut to the chase, the most obvious questions, which the team seemed a little weary of hearing, regarded road access and impact on the surrounding street infrastructure. The only way in and out of the sprawling estate’s cramped streets would be via the existing bottlenecks from Southleigh Road and Horndean Road, or from the North via Normandy Way.
Visitors arriving on foot at the venue from the town centre, across the Eastern Road footbridge and through ‘the avenues ‘ to Southleigh Road, will have been stuck by the impracticality of the project as drawn. By time they’d walked through the once-quiet Fifth Avenue or Hallet Road and found their way to the Stride Centre, some will almost have lost the will to live. Try to imagine doing that with loaded shopping bags, grumpy children or any level of disability.
When asked about daily vehicle movement, Scott Witchalls of Stantec predicted 4 trips generated per day, per housing unit, so for 2,100 homes, so, that makes 8,400 new movements onto the surrounding street network per day. Of course in Transport Assessment ‘brochure’ terms, many of those would be on foot, by cycle or by environmentally-friendly bus – rain or shine.
In real terms, we’d suggest, as very conservative estimate, this would generate at least 5,000 additional car movements per day across Southleigh Road, Bartons Road and Horndean Road.
The Bloor proposal does include some long-overdue traffic improvements, notably signalisation at the Horndean Road / Southleigh Road junction, the Horndean Road / Bartons Road / Emsworth Common Road junction and the Warblington Interchange.
These are improvements which our Hampshire County Council representatives at the highway authority should have been fighting for years ago, along with the Southleigh spine road, the missing link road between Bartons Road and a new dedicated junction on the A27.
It was not particularly comforting to hear from Scott that Stantec will be using Hampshire County Council’s very own TRICS trip generation estimating tool as one of the sources for the Transport Assessment that will accompany the outline planning application.
Forewarned is forearmed, and we shall be keeping a close eye on that document, firm in the knowledge that HCC highways will have signed it off as acceptable long before the planning application has even been ‘validated’ and published.
On the subject of the Missing Link Road, expect an important report on the HCS website in the coming days on the parlous state of Havant’s connections with the strategic road network.
Chris Garratt of White Peak Planning , second from the right in their home page image, was clutching a bound copy of the ‘Building a Better Future’ detailed Local Plan draft, apparently unfamiliar with the statement on page 87 that “The site promoter’s masterplan will be expected to take the 2017 published Framework Masterplan as a starting point.”
Bloor Homes are already established in the local area at Horndean, and the company’s Adam Rickenbach, was on hand as the Project Director at the Southleigh event. Adam was receptive to a request that Bloor Homes work with Havant Borough Council Planning Services to set up a Development Consultation Forum (DCF) at the Civic Plaza in order to properly open up the project for public pre-planning input, before formally submitting an outline planning application later in the year.
Adam also took on board our comment that, given the current unhelpful overlap with the Local Plan and St Faith’s Conservation Area consultations, the Bloor Southleigh consultation schedule should perhaps be extended by at least a further two, or preferably four weeks beyond the 30 June close date currently shown online and on the display boards, or perhaps 7 July according to the printed feedback form.
Given the significant scale of this potential planning application, we would encourage you to ask your ward councillors to insist that a DCF be held. Havant Borough Council must not be allowed to use this weekend’s marketing exercise as a measure of public acceptance of the proposal as a viable and validateable planning application.
Respond to the consultation
Once you’ve read the content of the boards shown above, and considered all the details, do try and make your views known by filling in this form to submit your comments.
You might, however, decide to wait until you’ve checked out the meeting being organised by the St Faith’s Councillors at Warblington School on Tuesday 24 June at 7:30 pm on the subjects of Southleigh Road Traffic and “Do we need a Link Road?”.
Havant Civic Society 
A link road should be connected before any more houses are built.
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