Oliver's Battery & Badger Farm Councillors

Winchester City Council's cabinet decided yesterday not to release the local reserve sites for development, at least not yet. This is a welcome decision. As I said in my previous post, I am far from convinced by the arguments that Winchester is falling short of development land. Certainly the proposals that went to cabinet yesterday appeared to contradict the advice members received earlier this year.

Residents and local Councillors were surprised, and a little bit shocked, to be invited recently to an exhibition by a property developer setting out development plans for Pitt Manor. We'd understood from a City Council report back in March that the site had been put on the back-burner.

The Pitt Manor site, in the south-west corner of Kilham Lane and Romsey Road is held in reserve in case there aren’t sufficient houses built in the Winchester area. The City Council's Tory Cabinet is due to decide today whether to release Pitt Manor, and the other local reserve sites, for development.

I’m worried about the additional cars that will want to access Romsey Road if Pitt Manor is developed. Romsey Road is narrow and busy. At rush hours it is solid with traffic.

I'm concerned that the proposals from the would-be developer are unimaginative in their approach to environment and climate change issues.

Most of all I'm concerned that, six months after being told that the Strategic Housing Land Availability Assessment (SHLAA) showed we had adequate land for new house building already identified, the story has changed so much that local reserve sites apparently "need" to be released. What is going on here?

David Spender writes:-

The summer is a relatively quiet time for city council business with only the Planning Development Control Committee meeting during August. Not that the weather has provided much opportunity to enjoy the time off!
One thing that does continue all through the year is ward work, attempting to deal with issues, problems and questions raised by residents. So I thought I’d use this article to give a brief flavour of the concerns that Brian Collin and I have been dealing with over recent weeks. Some of these are resolved, some continue:-
Sainsbury’s recycling centre – This was moved (without planning permission) to the far end of the car park next to houses in Fallowfield and Harrow Down. After much lobbying, Sainsbury’s have been persuaded to put in a planning application to move the recycling bins further away from neighbouring houses and, hopefully, reduce the noise nuisance to local residents. Fingers crossed that by the time this is published the bins will have found their way to a better location.
Braeside Close, Oliver’s Battery – It has taken a while, but pressure from Charlotte Bailey and your city councillors has finally resulted in the county Highways Department scraping the slippery green moss from the pavement.
Badger Farm Central Kickabout – There have been problems here with hard (golf and cricket) balls going over neighbouring fences and threatening damage and injury to local residents. As a passionate cricketer who also plays golf (badly) I would ask my fellow enthusiasts to stick to using soft balls in the limited space of Badger Farm….please.
Ashbarn Crescent – I’ve asked the city’s Dog Warden to renew the “No fouling” notices here as there seems to be a bit of a problem in the area.
Honeysuckle Close – I’ve asked for the missing street nameplate to be replaced and, together with one of the Oliver’s Battery parish councillors, asked for a number of old or damaged Oliver’s Battery nameplates to be repaired or replaced.
I could go on, but hopefully this gives you some idea of what we get involved in locally. Please get in touch if you have issues you feel we may be able to help with. Brian and I also have a monthly “Advice Centre” at Badger Farm Community Centre on the second Monday from 6.30 to 7.15 pm, so feel free to pay us a visit.

For the past year or so there has been a "Greening Campaign" running in Oliver's Battery, see http://www.greening-ob.org.uk/ for more information. This is one of a network of such campaigns running in villages and towns across the south of England. This is how the Greening Campaign describes itself:

The Greening Campaign was set up in response to the threat of global warming. It
is an innovative idea to help motivate people to reduce their energy consumption
and therefore lower their personal and community carbon footprint. The campaign
is the brain child of Terena Plowright, who is a resident of Petersfield and who
wanted to make a difference. The campaign was so successful it was taken up by
several other local communities. It is now operating across the South East
region, with enquires coming from across the country.The Greening Campaign is
fun, structured, and makes fighting climate change visible in your community.

So the question is, how about Greening Badger Farm? The Ollie B group are eager to pass on their experiences so far and help get things moving in BF. If you're interested let David or Brian know or, even better, come along to the Greening OB Sustainable Energy Meeting on Wednesday 17th June (7.30 pm at OB Primary School). Members of the OB Greening Campaign will be on hand after the meeting to chat with any interested people from Badger Farm. Hope to see you there!

Last night, in a 6 hour meeting ending at 1 a.m., Winchester City Council agreed the Core Strategy Preferred Options paper for the Local Development Framework (LDF). This now goes to "Pre-Submission Consultation" (a curious stage at which consultations have to be carried out but, apparently, no substantive changes can be made to the document). The current plan calls for the LDF to be submitted to central government for examination in July 2010.

The two major issues addressed in last night's debate were the proposal to allocate Barton Farm for the building of 2000 houses and the proposal to build a "Knowledge Park" on Bushfield Camp.

I have considerable reservations about both proposals. I believe Barton Farm, a stretch of farmland reaching into the city, helps give Winchester some of its unique flavour and that building there will both destroy this and add hugely to congestion in our narrow streets and at our already busy road junctions. As far as Bushfield in concerned I believe that the principal of building an out of town business park away from public transport and near to a motorway junction is wrong on environmental grounds. I also fear that such a development would offer little or no spin-off benefits to the rest of the local economy.

Both of these proposals were approved by council. However, a Liberal Democrat amendment on Barton Farm was also agreed. This added the words "This allocation will only be released when monitoring shows it is needed to meet the requirements of the South East Plan." The intention of this amendment was to buy time, by ensuring that Barton Farm is at the bottom of the list of allocated development areas not at the top.

Despite the amendments which, in my view, substantially improved the proposals I still could not bring myself to support the Core Strategy. I was therefore one of the minority of councillors who voted to reject the whole document.

Locally, there was good news for Oliver's Battery. The threat to build 2000 or more houses between us and Compton or at Pitt has now been removed for at least the life of the LDF. This was always a nonsensical idea and the strength of local feeling expressed through letters and surveys helped kick it into touch.