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?