Hart District Council’s Lack of Vision for the Local Plan in Hart District, Hampshire, England
We Heart Hart has been asked to present to Greywell Parish Council about the Hart Council’s Local Plan tomorrow, 26 May 2015. The presentation we will give is available for download below:
We Heart Hart were delighted to be invited to speak at tonight’s parish council meeting at Crondall.
The presentation went well with lots of interest in the Hart Local Plan and how we might persuade Hart Council to think again, particularly to focus on brownfield development and fight off the demand for us to build 3,100 extra houses for Surrey Heath and Rushmoor Borough Councils. Lots of interest in our leaflet too.
A copy of the presentation and leaflet are available for download below.
Hart District Council has made changes to the way it is preparing the Local Plan and dropped one of the consultations it said it was going to carry out. This leads to the suspicion that it is trying to force through a new settlement (Option 4), without adequately consulting the public or gaining proper support for its proposals.
If you would like to add your voice to those opposing the Council’s approach, please sign and share our petition:
Back in April 2014, Hart published its Local Development Scheme (LDS), that set out the timetable for producing the local plan. This clearly shows that there would be two “Regulation 18” consultations with the general public. The first was to be the consultation on the housing development options paper and the second was to be a consultation on a draft plan, due to take place in March 2015.
Hart Council Local Development Scheme 3rd Rev April 2014
However, in a revised Local Development Scheme (LDS), published in February 2015, this second Regulation 18 consultation has been dropped. The next time the public is going to be consulted is in Autumn 2015 when the Local Plan is complete and there is only six weeks before it is submitted for inspection.
Hart Council Local Development Scheme 4th Rev Feb 2015
This means that Hart District Council is proposing to move from a very general consultation on where to put 7,500 houses to a complete document ready for submission without any further consultation with the public. They barely raised the risk of Hart becoming a sink for 3,100 extra houses from Surrey Heath and Rushmoor.
As we have already documented, Hart has admitted it has no vision for the district, so it certainly has not consulted us on what we would like Hart to look like in 20 years time. Moreover, Hart is continuing to test a new settlement at Winchfield without consulting the public on whether they want the northern part of Hart to descend into a single urban sprawl. In addition, more people have signed our petition opposing its approach than responded to its own, inadequate consultation.
It is difficult to come to a conclusion other than Hart District Council is trying to force through a new town without proper consultation.
We would like to humbly suggest that Hart District Council thinks again and alters its approach to better engage the public in these very important decisions.
Impact of Housing Density on Land Required for Hart Local Plan
This diagram shows the impact of the area of land required to meet the housing need of 7,534 houses in the Hart Local Plan. Hart District Council use a rule of thumb of approximately 30 dwellings per hectare (dph) for new housing density. However, the study by Gareth Price showed that in urban areas it is quite possible to create vibrant communities with housing densities of 250 dph.
Using Hart’s metric of 30dph would mean we would have to find around 251 hectares (621 acres) of land to meet the housing need. Whereas if we were to build at a higher density of 250 dph on brownfield sites we would only need to find around 30 hectares of land (around 75 acres). These approximate areas are shown in the red squares on the map above.
Interestingly, Hartland Park (aka Pyestock), near Fleet is a brownfield site of 119 acres which is larger than we need to meet our total housing requirement.
We have already posted lots of other brownfield sites such as Sun Park near the M3, Ancell’s Farm and the derelict buildings at the end of Fleet Road in Fleet and Bartley Wood in Hook, Hampshire.
This shows that with vision, creativity, energy and political will, we can meet our housing needs for decades to come by properly utilising brownfield land and have no need to concrete over our beautiful green fields by building a new town.
If you would like to join the campaign to ask Hart District Council to think again, please sign our petition:
SHLAA Sites in Hart District Jan 2015
It’s official, in an answer to a question to be posed at tomorrow’s council meeting, Hart District Council has disclosed that it doesn’t have a vision. It is quite simply astonishing that after months of work on the Hart Local Plan they still don’t have a vision for what Hart is going to look like in 2031.
If you want to protest against this staggering lack of leadership, please sign and share our petition.
We Heart Hart posed a number of questions to the council ahead of tomorrow’s meeting. Among them was a question about their vision for the future of the district that they must prepare in accordance with the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF).
One might expect this to be an early part of their work so that they can objectively assess alternative development scenarios against that vision. However, their approach appears to be the other way round, decide where they are going to dump the houses and then retro-fit a vision to that. Sadly we seem to be on the slippery slope to a giant, sprawling conurbation in the north east of Hart by default (joining up Fleet, Dogmersfield, Church Crookham, Crookham Village, Hartley Wintney, Hook, Odiham and North Warnborough) because they can’t be bothered to come up with a more positive vision. Not only that, but they are still insisting on a new town option that will act as a sink for the 3,100 houses that Surrey Heath and Rushmoor say they can’t build.
Other revelations from their answers include:
The full questions and answers can be found here.
There is a Hart District Council meeting on 26 February at the Hart Council Offices in Fleet at 7pm. There is an opportunity for members of the public to ask questions about any subject including the emerging Local Plan. Great questions would be:
We Heart Hart has asked a number of these questions already as shown in the download and is aware of others asking questions too.
Please take some time to ask your own questions of the council. You can use the download below that already has the e-mail addresses in it you need. Questions need to be submitted by noon on Friday 20 February.
And if you have not done so, please sign the petition: https://you.38degrees.org.uk/petitions/we-hart
We Heart Hart asked Hart District Council for an analysis of the brownfield sites that are available under FOI. The results from this request are quite shocking and reveal a startling lack of focus on brownfield development. Hart’s assertion was that there was space for only around 700 houses on brownfield sites. According to their data, at first glance this appears to be true. However, it appears as though a large number of the vacant brownfield sites identified by Bravehart on his tour do not even appear in the Hart District Council analysis. There must be space for thousands more dwellings on these sites such as the vacant office buildings at Ancells Farm and in Hook and Hartland Park (Pyestock). Sun Park is on their map, but not in the analysis. Given undoubted difficulties facing all of us in Hart in building the >7,500 houses being forced upon us by the central Government mandated NPPF, it is shocking that Hart doesn’t seem to have a discernible brownfield strategy.
If you would like to join us to ask Hart to think again try harder to find brownfield development land and build on that in preference to concreting over our green spaces, please sign the We Love Hart petition.
Interestingly, the Government is planning to introduce legislation to penalise councils that under-perform on brownfield development. Under these plans, Councils would be required to publish data about available brownfield land on their websites in a standardised form, enabling individuals and groups to “assess and, if necessary, challenge the inclusion or exclusion of particular sites as brownfield land suitable for housing”. Whilst of course, these rules have not come into force, it seems Hart does have a way to go to comply with the forthcoming rules.
Our analysis of the data supplied showed:
It is time for Hart to focus more on identifying brownfield sites and applying pressure to get them made available. Surely, higher density development on these sites is far preferable to sacrificing our green spaces and putting at risk the very things that make Hart such a great place to live.
Images of brownfield sites in the district below:
Old Police Station in Fleet, Hampshire
Vacant office in Hook, Hampshire
Vacant office in Hook, Hampshire
Derelict Offices in Fleet, Hampshire
Vacant Block at Ancells Farm, Fleet, Hart District, Hampshire
Bartley Wood Estate in Hook
Bartley Wood Estate in Hook
Vacant Office in Fleet, Hampshire
Vacant Block at Ancells Farm, Fleet, Hampshire
Vacant Block at Ancells Farm, Fleet, Hampshire
Development Land in Fleet / Church Crookham, Hart District, Hampshire
Vacant Block in Fleet / Church Crookham, Hart District, Hampshire
Vacant, derelict block in Hook, Hampshire
Vacant offices in Hook, Hampshire
Vacant block at Ancells Farm, Fleet
Vacant Sun Park block near J4A of M3, Hart District, Hampshire
Hartland Park near Fleet, Hart District, Hampshire, warehouse development not started
Vacant Office at Ancells Farm, Fleet
Brownfield site near Crondall, Hart District, Hampshire
Brownfield site at Hartland Park, Pyestock, Hart District, Hampshire
Development site near Tweseldown, near Fleet/ Church Crookham, Hart District, Hampshire
Brownfield site at Pyestock, near, Fleet, Hart District, Hampshire
Downloads of posters to support the We Heart Hart (aka We ♥ Hart and We Love Hart) campaign and a letter to councillors are now available on the website.
The campaign is moving on quickly. We now have nearly 400 people who have signed the petition, and 31 January was the busiest day on the web site ever, with over 500 visitors. But to get our voice heard we need to get the number of people signing the petition over 550 – the number of respondents to the original consultation, and preferably into the thousands. It would be good to use the power of the internet to demonstrate that there is a strong groundswell of opinion against the path that Hart District Council is taking.
Please help spread the word across the district by downloading the posters, printing them off and putting them up across the district. Good locations would be sites with lots of foot-fall like railway stations, bus-stops, churches, community noticeboards and local shops.
The downloads are available here:
And if you haven’t already, please sign the petition.
Hart Council has made some assertions in meetings and in some documents that brownfield land in the district can only deliver around 700 houses. This is contrary to the land being tacked on the brownfield tracker.
However, no analysis to support this assertion has been provided. I did ask the council earlier this week for such an analysis, but no reply was forthcoming.
Accordingly, the We Heart Hart (aka We ♥ Hart and We Love Hart) campaign has made an Freedom of Information request asking them to set out the sites they have considered and the the amount and type of housing that can be built on each. More here:
https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/housing_capacity_of_brownfield_s/new
SHLAA Sites in Hart District Jan 2015
Is this what we want for Hart? Take a look at the image taken from a document on the council website, that shows all of the sites Hart are looking at for development into the future as at January 2015.
Whilst not all of them will make it into the Local Plan, it is clear that we are on the slippery slope to Hartley Wintney, Hook, Fleet, Dogmersfield, the Crookhams, Winchfield and Odiham coalescing into a single, sprawling conurbation. Each settlement will lose its distinctive identity and we will lose the green fields, wildlife and rural feel that make Hart such a great place to live.
Many of these sites are within the zone of influence of Thames Valley Special Protection Area and close to other environmentally sensitive areas such as the SSSIs at Basingstoke Canal and Odiham Common and the numerous other Sites of Interest to Nature Conservation (SINCs) that are dotted around the district.
The We Heart Hart campaign says we need to challenge this mindset of building a new town all over our green fields and force a re-think of the whole development strategy, with a much stronger focus on building on brownfield sites and increasing building density in the existing settlements.
Please sign the petition opposing this style of development: https://you.38degrees.org.uk/petitions/we-hart
