Two major consultations, three ticking timebombs

Over the next few weeks, Havant residents are being asked to do something remarkable: read, understand and respond to two of the most consequential planning processes this borough has faced in a generation – at more or less the same time and largely across the school summer holidays.

The two public consultations

From 20 July, Havant Borough Council opens a six-week public consultation on the Publication (Regulation 19) version of the Building a Better Future Plan – the document that will set planning policy for the whole borough through to 2043, covering everything from housing numbers and town centre regeneration to flood risk and green space.

Running alongside this is the public consultation period for one of the largest individual planning applications the borough has seen in years: Southleigh, a proposed new development of 1,800 homes on the fields of ‘The Southleigh Gap’, the farmland between Havant and Emsworth. Taken together with another long-running planning proposal for Campdown, a 590-home development in the green gap beside the A3M at Crookhorn, the draft Local Plan allocates these two sites for the delivery of close to one third of the entire Local Plan’s housing total for the next two decades.

It is worth noting that the Campdown planning application has been the subject of a two-year rolling objection by National Highways, requesting further data concerning the loading of nearby traffic junctions, most recently including the Asda roundabout.

Each of the new parallel consultations would, on its own, deserve your full attention:

• The Local Plan runs to almost 400 pages, sets around 60 detailed policies and some 30 site allocations, and – by the Council’s own admission in its committee papers – will still leave the borough meeting well under half of its assessed housing need.  
• The Southleigh application comes with thousands of pages of technical transport, ecological and design evidence, addressing questions of road capacity, flood risk, and habitat loss.  The documentation relating to traffic and transport alone runs to more than 2,300 pages, and that’s a topic on which many of you will focus.

Parallel consultations – A deliberate decision or an unfortunate consequence?

Anyone wanting to engage seriously with either or both of these consultations needs real time: time to read the material properly, time to take advice if needed, and time to write a considered response rather than a rushed one.  Instead, residents are effectively being asked to do all of this in the same narrow window — one that overlaps with the exact weeks when community groups, local societies and ordinary residents are typically least available to read council documents, attend meetings, or organise a considered response. Families are away, committees don’t meet, and the volunteers who usually help scrutinise this kind of material are, quite reasonably, on holiday.

We don’t know whether this overlap was a deliberate choice or simply an unfortunate consequence of a tight timetable, perhaps before planning staff themselves go on holiday.  We do understand that there will be pressure to publish the Local Plan now, tied to the wider reorganisation of local government in Hampshire, and we accept that some of that timing pressure is genuinely outside its control.  But whatever the explanation, the effect on residents is the same: two of the most far-reaching decisions this borough will make this decade are being put to the public at the point in the year when the public is least able to respond.

That is, at the very least, unfortunate planning on the Council’s part, and it deserves to be said plainly. A six-week window is the legal minimum for this stage of a Local Plan, not a maximum, and nothing prevented the Council from choosing a different six weeks.

This matters because these aren’t two separate stories. The Local Plan relies heavily on the Southleigh development for its housing numbers, yet the successful delivery of those homes — as anyone living in Havant knows — depends on a fundamental piece of infrastructure the Local Plan omits entirely: the missing Southleigh–A27 link road.

Residents responding to both consultations may well want to know how either can be deemed sound, given that both ignore the fundamental reality of the missing link road. Splitting the public’s attention across both processes at once, in the same few weeks, makes joined-up thinking harder for everyone – councillors and residents alike.

You might consider asking your ward councillors why they’re not following the example set by their peers at Havant’s former partner, East Hants District Council. The EHDC Councillors have decided to abandon their local plan effort, on the grounds that the Government’s intervention has made continuing work on the local plan ‘pointless and unjustifiable’.

The dates you need to know

It is surprising that the Southleigh Bloor Homes planning application was validated on 3 June, the documents were spotted by eagle-eyed residents and reported in an HCS post on 30 June, but was only published on the ‘Weekly Planning Notices today (Friday 10 July). We wrote to the Planning Office on 1 July, requesting the dates for the start and end of the consultation period, but as of the close of business today, have yet to receive a reply. Unfortunately the new planning system doesn’t display the level of detail that we were accustomed to with the previous system, so you won’t find the dates there.

The Local Plan goes to a full Council meeting next Wednesday, 15 July, and is expected to be published on 20 July. At that time, we will update the button below, to take you to the detail and the comment feedback process which is quite different to commenting on a planning application.

The ‘Traffic timebomb‘

Put simply, most objections are driven not by environmental issues but by roads that can no longer cope and neighbourhood streets overloaded by rat‑running traffic. A significant number also point to the chronic lack of wider, strategic thinking that has allowed the congestion to intensify year after year.

Havant Borough Council’s traffic time‑bomb arises from the structure of its strategic road network junctions, indicated by the blue diamonds on the map below. Two of the most heavily used, the A3(M)–A27 interchange and the Purbrook Way A3(M) junction, only offer limited access and rely on the Rusty Cutter and Asda roundabouts to enable full access. The town’s residential streets are further fragmented by the two railway lines which force traffic through three severely overloaded level crossings and an outdated road bridge at Park Road North, depicted by the red diamonds.

The constraints of Havant’s unique local highway network are felt every day by those who live here. But because so few planners are themselves residents, they do not experience these pressures directly and appear not to appreciate their full significance.

What Havant Civic Society is doing about it

We are currently preparing detailed, evidence-based submissions on both fronts: a considered response to the Local Plan’s soundness and deliverability, and separate, technical representations on the traffic and highways evidence submitted with the Southleigh and Campdown planning applications. That work takes time to do properly, and we intend to do it properly rather than quickly. We will publish our detailed findings and guidance for residents in good time before each relevant deadline, and we would rather get that right than rush it out now simply because the calendar is inconvenient.

In the meantime, we don’t want residents to be caught out by the overlap, or to assume that, because summer is here, these issues can wait until September. They can’t. Our advice is straightforward: mark the key dates now, before the holidays properly begin.

Have a look at the Local Plan documents and the Southleigh and Campdown application files while you have a quiet moment to do so, even if you don’t respond in detail straight away. If you plan to comment on more than one of these processes, start early rather than leaving everything to the final week of each consultation, when it will be hardest to give any of them the attention they deserve. And keep an eye on this website and social media over the coming weeks — we will be publishing our own analysis and practical guidance on how residents can make their views count on both the Local Plan and the two applications, in plenty of time before the deadlines close.

Havant’s residents are entitled to be heard properly on decisions that will shape the borough for the next twenty years. We intend to make sure they are and we will keep pressing the Council to explain why it considered this timetable acceptable in the first place.