Hart Council makes more errors in new local plan consultation

Hart Council keep getting it wrong

Hart Council have relaunched the consultation about the Local Plan and we are sad to report that there still appear to be errors and anomalies in the materials.

In summary, there are discrepancies between the number of houses proposed for each parish in the table on page 48 of the main consultation document and those proposed in the New Homes Booklet. In addition, not all of the settlements that will be affected by the dispersal option are named in the revised Question 4.

This comes despite the council saying in its announcement of the new consultation (our emphasis):

The earlier consultation which started in November was stopped on 14 January 2016 because it became apparent, following feedback from local residents, that not all the settlements that were anticipated to be included within one of the key questions had been correctly captured.

Leader of Hart District Council, Cllr Stephen Parker, said: “We have been working hard over the past weeks to identify and rectify our consultation material. This has been completed and we are now confident that the new consultation is robust.”

The fact that these errors were there in the first place is bad enough, but as they’ve now spent three weeks supposedly going through the material with a fine tooth comb and the errors are still there is beyond belief.  Surely now it is clear to all that we cannot continue like this and that those running this project are totally incompetent. We urge everyone to contact their councillors to ask them to intervene to replace the Local Plan Steering Group.  We also suggest that nobody responds to this new consultation until we know the new housing allocation from the revised Strategic Housing Market Assessment (SHMA), which is expected in late February.

The detail of the errors are shown below:

First, the new wording of Question 4 does not include Long Sutton or Odiham parishes even though both of those parishes are shown in the table on p48 of the main document, the New Homes Booklet and they are identified for comment in Q6 of the online consultation. Elvetham Heath is shown in Q4, the New Homes Booklet and opinion is sought in Q6 of the consultation, but it does not appear in the table.  South Warnborough is not in Q4, but it is in the table on p48, the New Homes Booklet and our opinion is sought in Q6 of the consultation.

[Update 1: We have been told that Approach 1, to which Q4 relates is supposed only to cover settlements outside the SPA zone of influence and that is why Long Sutton, Odiham and South Warnborough don’t appear.  We think this is confusing, especially considering Q6 is a question about all of the non-strategic sites and does include those parishes.]

[Update 2: Please also note that the description of Approach 1 changes depending upon which document you read, as the images below illustrate.

Summary Booklet Approach 1

Main Document Approach 1

New Local plan consultation Q4

New Local plan consultation p48 table

Second, here is a summary of the different impacts on the each parish in the different parts of the main consultation document, the new homes booklet and the SHLAA, with the differences highlighted in red:

New Local Plan consultation errors and discrepancies.

The main errors are with the following parishes:

Blackwater and Hawley, where the table says the impact will be 60 homes, but the New Homes Booklet (and Question 6) shows a total of 276 dwellings in sites SHL100 & SHL153.  Even worse, the same sites show a capacity of 380 in the official SHLAA.

Crookham Village, where there is a discrepancy between the capacities in the table in the main document and the capacities for the same sites in the New Homes Booklet, Q6 and SHLAA.

Elvetham Heath, where the table in the main document shows no impact, but the New Homes Booklet (and Question 6) shows 40 dwellings from SHL104 and the SHLAA shows a capacity of 45 dwellings for the same site.

Fleet, where the main document shows 30 dwellings, but the New Homes Booklet (and Question 6) show 73 dwellings from sites SHL320, 322, 338 & 357. The SHLAA shows a capacity of 217 dwellings for the same sites.

Hartley Wintney, where the main document and the New Homes booklet show a capacity of 290, whereas similar sites in the SHLAA have a capacity of only 180 units.  The main discrepancy being site SHL19 in the SHLAA showing a capacity of 80 dwellings on 32Ha, whereas in the New Homes Booklet, two smaller sites, SHL19a and SHL19b are shown with 150 and 90 dwellings respectively, or a total of 190 units.  It beggars belief that a sub-set of site SHL19 should have a larger capacity than the entire site.

Odiham, where the capacity shown in the main document is shown as 384 units, but the total of the shortlisted sites (and Neighbourhood Plan sites) is shown as 389 in the New Homes Booklet and the SHLAA for Odiham has a capacity of 434 for the same sites.

The overall impact is that the table on p48 gives a total of 2,896 dwellings on dispersal sites, whereas the total for the same sites in the New Homes Booklet is 3,227 and the total for the same sites in the SHLAA is 3,415.