News roundup week ending 12 July

Where's Nikki?

So, come the first Waverley Local Committee since the County election, ergo the first local committee to be held since Nikki Barton became the county councilor for Haslemere, and one tweep asks:

 

Not attending the Local Committee, at any rate.

Apparently, when the committee chair asked the officers to advise which members they had received apologies from, the response was that Mrs Barton “may be late”.

So late, in fact, that when the meeting finished she had not been sighted.  Perhaps the Ladies’ Final at Wimbledon went on longer than she had anticipated?

Anyway, consider this statement quoted in the Surrey Advertiser (on-line edition) at the end of January this year:

Nikki Barton, of Scotland Lane, who heads the campaign group, said: “….. anyone who witnessed the shambolic meeting can only conclude that the LAC structure is not fit for purpose.”

 

Mrs Barton evidently believes that there are problems with this committee.  Who's to say that she is wrong?  If so though you’d think she would want to get to work straight away on trying to reform it.

So, I’ll ask again:  where’s Nikki?

Many residents will now have seen evidence of the arrival of the new parking restrictions.  I had wondered when the one closest to my heart, Bunch Lane, would be done but even as I pondered this Surrey’s Finest were painting the double-yellows from St Christopher’s Green northwards to just beyond “Coniston”.  At time of writing the white-line marking of the parking bays was yet to be done but the road was coned off to permit the liners to work.

Having seen it on the ground I do have one technical reservation about the northernmost group of parking bays – the sightlines are not especially good and the road is rather narrower here than it is a few metres to either side.  I’ll have to go down there at the weekend with a camera and a tape measure to gather some measurements.

This week’s Herald has a piece about the Haslemere Vision.  HV has put up an online questionnaire on its website here.  I would urge you to complete it – it is really quite good, even if it does conflate traffic calming with the “holistic parking solution” chimera.  I have linked to the on-line survey but there is also a means of downloading the survey in print form here.  If you want to have your say about the issues which face Haslemere - and make your own suggestions for what to do about them - now is your chance.

Also on the front page of the Herald, a piece on the outcome of a planning enquiry for Dunsfold Aerodrome.

 

 

Well, not exactly.  Waverley Borough Council won the planning appeal against its refusal to grant permission for housebuilding on the site, on the grounds that the development was unsustainable.  (I have been here before.  1,000 homes on fields – and forget the “brownfield” tag, the vast majority of the site is covered by virgin grass – some miles from the nearest settlements with shops and schools, even further from decent transport links and with below-mediocre road links, is not “sustainable” whatever the “Flying Scotsman” Jim McAllister, owner of the site, may say)  The owners then said “OK, in that case we want to use it as an airfield, so we’ll ask for unrestricted movements permission” to replace the current consent for a maximum of 5,000 movements (take-offs or landings) per annum.

What they got – and not before 2018 – is confirmation that the original 1951 planning consent could be relied on.  That permits unrestricted movements for the manufacture, repair, maintenance and flight testing of aircraft.  It does not permit the aerodrome to be operated as an airport, or a “Business Aviation” (ie private jet) terminal, or a cargo terminal, or anything like that. It permits aircraft to arrive and leave for the purposes of undergoing maintenance and repair, and to be flight-tested during such maintenance and repair.  (As commented on in the article, the third aspect of use, ie manufacture, can be seen separately.  They don’t have to include manufacture, and it is unlikely that there would be any demand for it).

I was sad to see that the local Friends of the Earth have spouted so much guff about this issue, although I will give them credit for making at least one sensible suggestion.

 

Exactly – I am no expert on the aviation industry, although as a former pilot I perhaps know a little more than most, but I suspect that a serious commercial operation to repair and maintain airliners and business jets could not actually use the 5,000 movements per annum envisaged in the current temporary permission.  Take a look at Lasham, in Hampshire, where an airliner maintenance facility shares an aerodrome with the gliding cub. 

Indeed, if it could, I can’t imagine that Gatwick Airport or the Civil Aviation Authority would tolerate it.  It is far too close to published arrival and departure routes for Gatwick’s traffic.

 

Other front page features relate to the Haslemere Food-bank, and to Fracking in Fernhurst.  It is shaming to think that in a town like Haslemere, there are people whose circumstances are such that they have to rely on a foodbank, but hats off to the local churches and generous residents who have supported this.  On fracking, the management of our Haslemere Hall could do something useful, and offer to show the documentary film “Drill, Baby, Drill” which is to be shown in the Fernhurst village hall this weekend, for we are not unaffected by this even if it is five miles away.

Meanwhile, on the letters page, we have this response to Graeme Spratley’s letter published last week.

OKaaaay – Graeme and I must have been smoking something then, when we could have sworn we saw and heard a group of individuals representing themselves as from Haslemere Vision gave a presentation to Haslemere Town Council, observed by (since) Councillor Barton and Robert Serman, on their proposals for the Fairground site back in March!

Then, eventually, after a lengthy holiday from parking letters, we have this:

Generally a thoughtful letter, which is more than can be said of all correspodents to the Herald, but I think it contains some misconceptions:

·         Neither Waverley, nor Surrey, nor the Town Council, have any control over business rates.  Rateable values are determined by the valuation office of HM Revenue & Customs, and the “multiplier” is set nationally, by national government.  Local authorities collect the money but they have to hand it over to the Treasury, which then doles it out across local authorities – and you can be sure that what gets doled out to Waverley etc is considerably less than what gets collected by them.  Our local authorities don’t really have any financial interest in business rates

·         References are made to the “cost” to WBC of the afternoon tickets, but they know full well, as the proceedings of the committee meeting show, that this cost is entirely theoretical.  It implies users would have parked for 2 ½ hours each day Monday – Wednesday and paid the standard charge, which of course they would not.  Nor does it really represent much of a loss to users – the point is to encourage them to park in the High St car park at less busy times of the shopping day by offering them a flat fee and escape from the current bind of rummaging around for loose change.

·         Of course the offer is for a small proportion of people – 0.3% or whatever – but it is a pilot.  As Councillor King said in committee, “I intend to retain the trial to 50 permits initially but propose to review this each quarter throughout the year and adjust it as appropriate”.  The point is, if it works, ie if it increases footfall in the nearby shops by improving the utilisation of parking spaces at otherwise quieter times of day and week, and also thus increasing availability of free spaces at the busiest times through displacement effect, then it may be offered more widely and more permanently

There are plenty of people – and one prominent town centre retailer is among them – who believe that the real issue for declining footfall relates more to the quality and variety of the retail offerings we currently have.  Some, such as Cockerills Shoes, have clearly sussed it, and whatever it is they have, they should bottle it and sell it to their neighbours.  Others do less well.  As Michael Clayton says, we have – for example - no mobile phone shop, and that would be a helpful additional to our retail mix.

And finally – pondering what has happened to our local county councillor, whose photo or quotes seem to have featured in virtually every edition of the Herald for the last several months, I made a search – not manually of course, I used a search engine on the on-line edition – with this result:

So, where’s Nikki?

Perhaps there’s a clue in her current Twitter profile page:

Could she be hibernating?