News roundup week ending 22 March 2013

Haslemere Town Council has submitted an objection to a planning application by developers to demolish a Victorian villa at 34 Kings Road, and replace it with a block of flats with parking spaces.  Generally speaking their grounds for objection seem eminently sensible:  destruction of an attractive period property to be replaced by some carbuncle; insufficient off-street parking potentially creating additional pressure on on-street parking in Kings Road.  There is one argument however which I found quite amusing – they cite the road danger arising from the design of the off-road parking spaces which would lead to cars reversing out into the street.

Curiously, they didn’t think this consideration at all important when applied to the “echelon parking” arrangements outside Costa in the High Street, and Shepherds Hill where – oops! – parked cars have to reverse into a busy road!

As advertised last week, Haslemere Action Group in conjunction with Haslemere Society, Vision  and Chamber of Trade, has been leafleting cars parked around the station urging them to object to WBC’s application under s38 of the Commons Act for permission to do resurfacing works on the Fairground car park.  Here is a photo of their leaflet.

One of the contributors to the HAG website – presumably a supporter, as they apparently won’t register anyone they recognise as an opponent on their “open, sensible and democratic forum*” – contributed the following nugget, which HAG posted without any apparent sense of irony:

The WBC application for consent from the Secretary of State is with regards to works on Common Land. Any objections should therefore be based on the fact that the barriers, fencing, re-cycling bins, parked cars etc prevent members of the public from using the Common.
The fact that it is an area of Common land means that EVERYONE has a right of access at all times [24/7 365 days of the year] for air and excercise on foot and on horseback under Section 193 of the Law of Property Act 1925.
WBC should be protecting this area of Common Land and not developing it.
WBC state in Q28 of the application that the “Off Street Parking Places Order 2012″ applies to the Fairground car-park. This states that persons cannot, without permission, tether, drive or ride any animal or undertake any recreational activity. This contradicts the rights under the Law of Property Act 1925 that apply to this area of Common.

A peek at the draft design – not final, because the proposal is to let a contract for design & build, ie the contractor will come back with a final proposal for how the site will look when finished – suggests that there will be an element of fencing to distinguish between the commuter parking area and the shoppers’ short-term parking area.  Of course, the fencing will have to be arranged in such a way that cars can negotiate around it, so presumably people will be able to walk around as well!

 

Meanwhile, the same group presented a proposal to HTC last week in which they propose a development of the fairground site to include underground parking and a form of shopping mall, possibly including M&S as an anchor tenant – how exactly would you exercise your rights under the Law of Property Act 1923 then?

* Perhaps you have heard of the great 18^th Century French poet and writer Voltaire, probably most famous for his novel “Candide”, which contains the immortal lines “every now and then we shoot an admiral, pour encourager les autres (to encourage the others).  Perhaps his second-most-famous quote is his observation about the Holy Roman Empire, still extant during his lifetime, which he dismissed as “neither Holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire”.

The Haslemere Herald featured this story on its front page – they do love a “parking woes” story – under the headline “Wey Hill protestors make plea”.  Much of the article is simply  a repetition of what I have set out above, but I note that Pope's Mead resident, Graeme Spratley, is quoted challenging Haslemere & Villages Vision's development scheme due to long-known technical problesm with the site's suitability for construction. 

At the foot of the article a photo shows the demonstrators who turned out to protest the WBC application – all of about 10 adults and half a dozen kids answering the call to arms posted in the HAG website.  I haven’t copied it to here because the on-line version of the paper is too low resolution, but you can always add to the Herald’s coffers by buying your own copy to see for yourself! 

Analysis of ROP statutory consultation

It now appears that attempts to obtain a full analysis of the responses to the October/November statutory consultation on the ROP schemes have come to nought, although a little information has emerged about the Surrey Highways officers’ methodology in compiling and analysing those responses.  Without the full information the picture remains unclear but a number of things can be inferred from what has actually been written down.

Taking the published analysis, as supplied in advance of the Waverley Local Committee meeting on January 24^th, with the further information provided, the following picture emerges:

·         Officers counted 382 respondents to the consultation.  In arriving at this number, they have eliminated any double counting, for example where an individual has signed a petition, or complete the on-line response form, and also emailed comments individually.  They have also discounted all unidentified respondents claimed by persons writing on behalf of a resident association or similar, but without individually naming them – otherwise they might have inadvertently double-counted if some of those unnamed individuals had also responded individually

·         They have however counted each individual objection or supporting comment, so that if an individual wrote to support, or object to, more than one named scheme giving grounds in each case, they counted more than one response.  Where an individual wrote to say “I support/object to all of the schemes” that has been counted as a single generaL response

·         The 382 respondents made a total of 248 supporting comments and 507 objections, a total of 755 responses – about 2 each.

·         While this cannot be explicitly evidenced, it appears as though (close to) 248 respondents each made one comment in support of one scheme or another, while the balance – the remaining 134 or thereabouts – made the 507 objections, on average nearly four each.  The written analysis certainly refers to individuals objecting to more than one scheme or indeed to all the schemes, but it does not mention that supporters supported more than one, and this seems reasonable if one considers that by and large residents supported only their own schemes, feeling that commenting on another scheme might be undue interference in the affairs of their neighbours.

·         In summary, this suggests that supporters outnumbered objectors by a factor of close to two to one.

Reasons cited for objections included two key themes:  firstly, that the street-by-street approach should be abandoned in favour of a “holistic” solution.  There is no indication of any objector proposing what that holistic solution might be, and the HAG website, which advocates such a solution, also has no explicit proposals to offer.  Personally, I would keep an open mind about a “controlled parking zone” solution.  They have been known to work well elsewhere, around Horsham station for example, and  perhaps a CPZ scheme might also have resolved the commuter issue without leaving residents of individual streets unable to find parking.  However, in the absence of a constructive CPZ proposal by the objectors, and with the additional delays that its design would no doubt have caused, the street-by-street approach does at least go most of the way.  Given that the nature of the consultation was that people would support their own scheme while objectors would likely  object to many or all, it would have been interesting to see the responses if a single unified scheme had been proposed.

The second theme is that any scheme should await the construction of a multi-storey car park at the station, which is cited as the solution to most of the parking congestion issues.  Objectors referring to this argument may not have considered the challenge of having the cost of the scheme – some £9m – funded or how, without parking restrictions or comparable charges for on-street parking to eliminate “unfair competition”, both of which the objectors opposed (charges having been dropped due to opposition last March) the operators could reliably forecast revenues sufficient to service that cost.  It also rather appears that some prominent objectors who cited this argument had submitted objections to the planning application for the multi-storey last time it was made.