‘The Denvilles Gap’ – Do we need a link road?

Judging by the crowded hall at Warblington School, the Havant St. Faith’s councillors’ public meeting served less to question necessity and more to underline what was already glaringly obvious.

The extraordinarily well-attended meeting was organised by Havant Labour Party and fronted by the party’s three St Faith’s ward councillors. Cllr. Phil Munday was supported by Cllr. Gillian Harris and Cllr. Dan Berwick, as they faced a packed gymnasium audience made up of their Denvilles neighbours. Also on hand were several residents from the ‘other side of the tracks’, from Havant Town and from Emsworth, whose ward councillors were also represented in the audience along with the two now unelected representatives to Hampshire County Council (HCC).

Phil took care to explain that his role was a ‘special one’ and that as Leader of both the Council and its Cabinet, he had to tread a fine line, keeping planning issues at arms length in order not to demonstrate bias. Gillian, also a Cabinet member was similarly limited in what she could bring to any emerging campaign, leaving Dan in the hot seat as the only ward councillor with a free campaigning hand.

The team seemed taken aback by the numbers in the audience, spilling out into the corridor at the front and, for the luckier ones, the fresh air beyond the open fire doors. Right from the start, with his headteacher background coming to the fore, Phil had good reasons for trying to keep the meeting short.

There was genuine concern about the fire regulations, though with a school hall full of grown-ups he might have been less concerned. More worryingly though, it looked like it was going to be a nigh-on impossible task fielding the questions on everyone’s mind. Advice from the floor came early; “This is bloody stupid” and “You just have to stop it!” being the first raised voices heard above the general muttering.

After Gillian explained her own role and the restrictions placed on her by Cabinet responsibilities, Dan took over the reigns to explain what people should do. His focus, quite rightly, was on the Leader’s already stated plea that everybody should make their comments on the local plan at the online link – see details at the foot of this post. That, put simply, was the ward councillors’ recommendation to the audience.

The question posed by the meeting was the wrong question, the need for the Bartons Road / A27 Southleigh link road. is not in doubt. The real question that should have been asked was ‘How do we make it happen?’ And to arrive at the answer to that question, we need to take a much bigger view.

The St Faith’s Councillors had kindly allowed HCS a slot on the agenda to try and paint that bigger picture. It’s a view born out of Havant Civic Society’s hard-won experience of local authority planning failures in Havant.

In a few brief slides, Bob Comlay introduced the room to the impact that some of HBC’s recent planning howlers have had on the Strategic Road Network. The map below had been modified from a document that had been submitted to National Highways in March 2025 in response to their concerns about the Campdown planning site, far away to the west, marked by ‘J’ on the left hand side of the map shown below.

The questions posed in that document had been given careful and considered thought by the National Highways spatial planners in their response. To date, no response has been received from either Havant Borough Council or HCC. Bob confirmed that the document would be updated with the National Highways responses and expanded to include the ‘Missing Link’ at ‘SRN5’ – aka ‘The A27 Havant East junction’. The final document will be published on the HCS website to add to the discussion in the coming days.

Following the three presentations, the Leader took to the microphone again. Cllr. Munday remarked that there were a number of councillors on hand in the room who could take questions from the audience, at which point Cllr. Grainne Rason gamely stood up to be counted, though she’s also a Cabinet member so presumably unable to comment.

The Hampshire County Councillors present, Jackie Branson and Lulu Bowerman, were standing with the residents off at the left hand side of the room. Lulu stepped forward to explain to the meeting that, while she is the HCC Cabinet Lead for Highways, she would be unable to help with the link road issue because ‘this specific problem’ is somebody else’s responsibility’ – a response which is now frankly a little tired.

The meeting started to fizzle out after 45 minutes as people began to wilt, recognising that political shoulders were already sloping in every other direction than forward.  But not before a voice from the floor had posed a question that many of us were probably thinking: 

“What about construction traffic and emergency vehicle access?”

Phil’s response was that ‘you’ll get the chance to make that comment when the planning applications have been published’.

Editorial comment

Phil’s answer, if you take Havant Borough Council’s currently established process at face value, is correct. However the evidence, which is likely to be even stronger after the planning committee decision on 26 June, all points to the reality being rather different.

A weak council blindly follows unsound process and prevailing political party dogma, whereas stronger and more visionary local authorities stand up and defend their community through effective scrutiny of the local planning process and resistance to national policy where it plainly doesn’t make sense.

The previous administration brought us ‘the benefits of the Freeport’ , leaving only white van chaos, vastly more daily traffic in the town centre and a few random, business rate-free tenants at Dunsbury Park. The current administration appears already to be heading for similar buffers if they don’t think outside the box and develop a grown-up strategy for Havant.

You cannot simply put 2,000 houses on the wrong side of the railway without first sorting out the strategic road junctions. That isn’t rocket science and it seemed that the bulk of the audience agree.

The unfortunate reality is that Havant Borough Council’s Planning Services team and Hampshire County Council’s highways planning team are unable to see beyond their disconnected silos.

Unless a firm grip is taken on the issues with the planning process, we can be certain that the developers will find a way to squeeze a profit out of the Denvilles Gap at the council’s expense. Havant Borough Council’s planning services officers will recommend all plans be approved, using the excuse that Hampshire County Council Highways have declared that the planning applicant’s traffic calculations are robust. And as the man from Stantec told us at the Bloor Homes Stride Centre session, those discussions are already well advanced.

On past performance, by time the planning application is formally published for consultation, the direction and the draft decision will already have been set.

The way forward

In our opinion, residents should be pushing for cross-border ‘Traffic Summit’ between Havant Borough Council and Chichester District Council. Both counties have a requirement for a properly thought out full-access junction between the A27 Warblington and Fishbourne interchanges. We first suggested this earlier in 2024 following the predictable outfall from HBC’s Amazon planning fiasco. Click the image below for details.

This way forward will be explored in a forthcoming post, including the revised paper outlined by the HCS speaker. If you think this would be of interest to you, please get in touch with us by taking the appropriate option under ‘About us’ on the main menu.

Respond to the Local Plan

HCS has a comprehensive post with links to all referenced documents and instructions for completing your submission to this draft stage of the Local Plan. Please click the link in the previous sentence to access the post.

If you are concerned about the ‘missing’ Link Road, then make sure that you include that message in your response to Allocation 1 – Denvilles. We would suggest that it is equally important to respond to Allocation 31 ‘Interbridges West’, noting that that space must be reserved for a strategic A27 Havant East interchange.