Here is an A4 poster to promote the We Heart Hart (aka We ♥ Hart and We Love Hart) campaign. Please print it out and post it in your window and on post it on village notice boards.
It looks like this:
Category Archives: Hart District Council
Hart District Council, Hampshire, England
Launch of We ♥ Hart Petition
The We Heart Hart Campaign (aka We Love Hart and We ♥ Hart) have now started a campaign on 38 degrees to petition Hart Council to change its approach to the Hart Local Plan. This petition can be found here: https://you.38degrees.org.uk/petitions/we-hart.
Please support this petition by signing it and sharing it with all your friends via e-mail, Facebook and Twitter.
We need to protect all of our parishes including: Blackwater and Hawley; Bramshill; Church Crookham; Crondall; Crookham Village; Dogmersfield; Elvetham Heath; Eversley; Ewshot; Fleet; Greywell; Hartley Wintney; Heckfield; Hook; Mattingley; North Warnborough; Odiham; Rotherwick; South Warnborough; Winchfield; and Yateley from this invidious plan.
We Heart Hart Campaign Logo
We Heart Hart Campaign
Today marks the launch of the We Heart Hart campaign (aka We Love Hart and We ♥ Hart).
We believe the Government and Hart Council should think again. The objectives of our campaign are as follows:
- To call for the overall housing allocation to be reduced by challenging the SHMA in front of the Inspector.
- To demand that the Council develops a vision and strategy for Hart that retains its role as a rural, green hinterland for NE Hampshire that respects the separate character and identity of Hart’s settlements and landscapes and preserves the green spaces as amenity space for the urban settlements.
- To require that the housing need is met by building on brownfield sites and increasing density in our existing urban areas to help rejuvenate our existing shopping centres.
- To request that future housing stock reflects the needs of the changing demographics of the district, particularly the elderly and infirm.
- To petition the council and government against any new settlement in Hart that will act as a sink for the unmet housing need in neighbouring areas.
- To hold Hart Council to account to ensure the process is legal and transparent and properly consults all of the residents of Hart.
We Love Hart Campaign Logo
What’s wrong with Hart Council’s Approach?
We have several problems with Hart’s current approach:
- Lack of overall vision for the district. Sadly Hart Council is simply reacting to events and not setting out a vision of what it wants the district to look like in 20, 30, 50 or 100 years time. This means that if we are not careful, we will end up with piecemeal development that will damage the very things that make Hart an attractive place to live. Ideas for an improved vision are shown here.
- Opening up the District to being a sink for the unmet housing needs of other districts. The overall housing allocation plan for the plan period calls for 1,800-2,400 homes to be built in a new town at Winchfield. However, the Barratts document Vision Document suggests that a new town at Winchfield could entail 5,000 new houses. By pure coincidence (of course), Surrey Heath and Rushmoor Borough Councils need to find space for about 3,100 more houses in their districts. Building a new town anywhere in Hart opens up the strong possibility that we will be forced to take this additional requirement from bordering areas.
- Lack of focus on brownfield sites. There are many brownfield sites in Hart, that the Council are ignoring.
- Lack of provision for elderly and infirm. According to the SHMA, by 2031, there will be an additional 10,000 people over 60 (including more than 6,850 over 75) expected to be living in the district and an extra 3,620 people who will be suffering from dementia or have some sort of mobility problem. Section 9 of the SHMA suggests that future housing stock should be built to broadly reflect the existing stock. This new stock will attract more families to the area and crowd out the developments required to meet the needs of the elderly and infirm.
Overall, the lack of strategy, opening up the potential for a new town and not addressing the needs arising from changing demographics amount to very serious flaws in approach which puts our countryside at risk.
We have outlined an alternative approach to producing the local plan here.
What’s Wrong with the Housing Target?
[These arguments have been expanded and refined on this page]
The December 2014 version of the Strategic Housing Market Assessment (SHMA) for Hart District Council, and Surrey Heath and Rushmoor Borough Councils (together the Housing Market Area) can be found here.
The SHMA above calls for around 7,534 houses to be built in Hart District over the period from 2011-2031 and 23,600 over the whole area. It is built on a process mandated by the Government, but at almost every stage the decisions taken err on the side of building more houses. Examples of this are:
- The starting point for the housing need is population projection. The Department of Communities and Local Government (DCLG) population projections would lead to an overall need for 790 houses per annum across the whole Housing Market Area, or 15,800 houses in total. This approach in itself essentially says that if you have carried out lots of development in the past (such as Elevetham Heath, Queen Elizabeth Barracks and St. Mary’s Park), you must continue to develop at that rate even though there has been net migration out of the area in recent years.
- However, the report then states that the ONS usually understates these requirements so cherry picks inward migration data from the time we were building most housing, reverses the recent trend in average household size makes an arbitrary adjustment upwards to 925 houses per annum, leading to a need for 2,700 additional houses over the plan period and taking the total to 18,500.
- During the unsustainable economic boom from 1998 to 2008, the whole housing market area created jobs at around 720 per annum. Over the full economic cycle from 1998 to 2012 the whole area generated jobs at a rate of 529 per annum. The report assumes that up to 2031 the area will create jobs at more than double this, at a rate of 1,130 per annum. This has the effect of increasing the number of houses required to 1,180 per annum, or a total of 23,600 houses. Over the plan period this leads to a need for a further 5,100 extra houses being required.
The combination of these and other assumptions is that the combined area of Hart, Surrey Heath and Rushmoor needs to build an additional 7,800 houses (of which around a third is allocated to Hart District) over and above the government starting point which adds to the pressure on our green spaces and adds to congestion.
The impact on Hart is we have to build 7,534 houses. But Surrey Heath and Rushmoor have said that we need to build 3,100 houses that they say they can’t build in their own area. This pushes up our target to around 10,600 houses. If the questionable assumptions in the SHMA were taken away, our housing target would fall substantially to around 6,100 houses, but there may be opportunities to shift some of our remaining target on to Surrey Heath and Rushmoor.