The Bloor Homes planning application was apparently received by HBC Planning Services on 12 May, and ‘validated’ on 3 June, almost a month ago. So some of you might be asking why hasn’t it appeared on the Weekly Planning List yet?
The next obvious question you might ask is, “when does/did the formal public consultation period start?”
Or did it actually start on 3 June, in which case we’re probably already too late to comment.
This is just an early ‘heads up’ to those of you who are keen on looking at the detail and happen to have half a gigabyte of storage available at home. (For all its ‘cloud‑based’ branding, the new planning system can’t even show documents in the cloud. You have to download everything first – a step the legacy system never forced on you.)
Click the proposed Southleigh street scene below, and you’ll find the full list of documents. (Don’t worry, if you’re already too scared by the picture, we’ll run through a few random statistics below the picture.)
Here are a few stats:
122
That’s the number of documents you’ll see in the list.
84
That’s the number of ‘instances’ – the number of appearances – of the word ‘Affordable’.
1,721
Instances of the word ‘A27‘ (But don’t get too excited, none of them relate to a new junction.)
0
The number of times that the word ‘Amazon’ appears across the whole document set. The significance of this becomes clearer when you consider the fact that the most recent traffic survey data across the whole document set dates from 2023, so taken before Amazon’s traffic reached current levels, and does not assess the residential streets Amazon’s DSP and Linehaul partners use to reach the Warblington Interchange. Watch this space.
508
That’s the number of spare megabytes of storage that you’ll need to view the application documents on your PC, laptop, tablet or phone – that’s over half a gigabyte of storage. (We’ve already downloaded them all and stored them here in the HCS personal cloud.)
16
of those documents make up the supporting Transport Assessment documents, that’s a slim
120MB
of storage, comprising:
2,035 pages
in which you’ll find
300
instances of the word ‘TRICS‘, an acronym which raises red flags every time we see it.
1,204
instances of the word ‘Southleigh Road’
152
instances of the word ‘New Lane’
780
instances of the word ‘cycle’, along with 158 ‘cyclist‘s, 129 ‘passenger‘s and not a single ‘motorist’.
2
instances of the word ‘Ambulance’ (it’s a pet subject of ours). Here’s one of them:
27
instances of the word ‘Footbridge’. Here’s just one of them:
1
instance of the word ‘Strategic Highway Network’ – That’s the A27 to us and to you.
Since we know you’re keen to see that reference, here it is:
Before you get too excited, we’ve already taken a look. Could it be that the magic formula for access to the A27 is in Section 9?
Let’s take a look:
Which leaves us pondering the following line of text:
“When toggled to “High Quality, the inconvenience factor is reduced in the Binary-Logit model to reflect a more attractive and immediately accessible public transport service.”
Hampshire County Council Highways will already have convinced Havant Borough Council Planning Services that the Transport Assessment and the Environmental Statement is ‘Robust’.
After only a couple of hours of analysis, we already beg to differ. For a start, it only looks at half the picture.
You might want to take another look at the HCS report of January’s Development Consultation Forum. Click the image below, to read, and if you’ve got 15 minutes to spare, watch and listen to the Community Group Contributions by taking this link.
On a serious note, how on earth is the public meant to be able to raise serious comments on a planning application, when the tools available to us – which lets face it, we paid for through our council taxes – are simply not fit for the purpose?
“The above improvements will deliver significant new safer crossing points for pedestrians and cyclists, as well as increases in highway capacity to mitigate the impact of the development traffic.” I object strongly to having my intelligence insulted by this nonsense. There can be no increase in highway capacity on Southleigh Road and whilst some people who work for Stantec might be having visions, i suggest they come off the drugs they are taking. This is going to cause misery on Southleigh Road for all existing residents. The Transport Assessment has been made to fit exactly what Bloor Homes want and whoever at HCC has signed off on this needs to hang their head in shame and will eventually be held to account if this succeeds. This assessment also takes no account of development on the A259 towards Chichester. Denvilles residents have accepted that these houses are coming. We just don’t want the gridlock that it WILL create and that’s not some airy fairy vision.
With Havant Borough Council’s Planning Service seemingly incapable of lateral thinking and blinkered to objections grounded in basic common sense, I couldn’t agree more.
Chichester District Council’s continuing A259 housing expansion is driving ever‑greater commuter flows into the Warblington A27 junction – exactly as Amazon’s DPO1 operation is driving up delivery traffic into the same choke point. Until HBC finally bites the bullet and enforces the planning conditions attached to its ill‑judged 2022 approval of the New Lane Amazon site, both traffic streams feeding into Warblington will continue to escalate. That SRN junction will remain the bottleneck that backs up both the Southleigh Road and New Lane level crossings.
HCS made this point at the DCF in January, only to be shut down by the interim Head of Planning. Watch the five minute clip here: https://youtu.be/twixwp9KRfc?t=3553
Sorry to be a pedant but 508 megabytes is about half a gigabyte, not half a terabyte. It is about 0.0005 terabytes. So most people will prob lay be okay downloading the documents.
Oooops. Corrected, with thanks. Good job somebody’s awake!