Planned COMPTON Housing Development, Cllr Cole ignoring local opinion..again Options

[gel]

http://www.newburytoday.co.uk/2013/framewo...oved-by-council

Compton Animal Institute Site:

Anyone who knows road/(lane really) from middle of Compton to A34 via E Ilsley will know this is very narrow in parts, and locals have rightly expressed concern at several hundred new houses, generating many hundreds of additional car movements, at site in link.

Cllr Cole in her normal manner dismisses local opinion, and sees no worries in that direction at all; remember, several years she was head of the Committee that introduced by stealth, the move to fortnightly waste collections.

There was a scam consultation amongst a tiny % of electorate, and even then it was never on questionnaire that "Would you like a move to fortnightly collections", rather a vague one, so Council got answer they wanted eg "YES" to 'Do you want increased recycling?'.
(Most would answer yes to that I wager).

She represents Chieveley of course so predicted gridlock at rush hour periods at Compton presumably will have no personal impact.

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There is an up side which most seem to have missed in that any development would possibly keep the local village pub(s) open. The loss of these establishments due to lousy patronage suddenly becomes a major issue when the freeholders can no longer afford to continue to subsidise the business.

[Simon Kirby]

There is an up side which most seem to have missed in that any development would possibly keep the local village pub(s) open. The loss of these establishments due to lousy patronage suddenly becomes a major issue when the freeholders can no longer afford to continue to subsidise the business.

That argument doesn't work for me. It's true enough that the bigger a settlement the more jobs and services it can support locally, but a modern settlement needs to be 20,000 strong before it has anything like the jobs and services to make the settlement relatively self-sufficient.

But you touch on an important issue about sustainability and community. The village pub, like the church, was a focus for village life, and communities are worse off for having lost that - in fact it's that loss of community that is a causes of social problems. Designing in community is one of the challenges for any new build.

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Designing in community is one of the challenges for any new build.

That can only happen if there is a new build and the planners are a bit more circumspect about the cash they extract from the developer. S106 payments always seem to me not to be about the community as a whole and tend to be rather vague about what the money will be spent on. Libraries is one area that seems to do well, there's always a nice lump for that pot which I doubt ever gets out of the council strongroom.

[Simon Kirby]

That can only happen if there is a new build and the planners are a bit more circumspect about the cash they extract from the developer. S106 payments always seem to me not to be about the community as a whole and tend to be rather vague about what the money will be spent on. Libraries is one area that seems to do well, there's always a nice lump for that pot which I doubt ever gets out of the council strongroom.

S106 can be useful, but when I talk about designing in community I'm thinking about much more than bunging the town council a few quid for a couple of swings and an oak tree. Planning control needs to discourage piecemeal housebuilding and encourage the building of planned communities with communal spaces and facilities, and a bunch of other stuff that I can't rightly say what it is, but it's the stuff that vibrant villages have - though the secret would seem to be that people do stuff together with their neighbours and they have an attachment and pride in the place they live, and that needs to be facilitated in the settlement that gets built.

[Exhausted]

S106 can be useful, but when I talk about designing in community I'm thinking about much more than bunging the town council a few quid for a couple of swings and an oak tree. Planning control needs to discourage piecemeal housebuilding and encourage the building of planned communities with communal spaces and facilities, and a bunch of other stuff that I can't rightly say what it is, but it's the stuff that vibrant villages have - though the secret would seem to be that people do stuff together with their neighbours and they have an attachment and pride in the place they live, and that needs to be facilitated in the settlement that gets built.

That's exactly right and I bet if developers thought that instead of a WBC S106 grab for infrastructure, money could be channeled into the community by mutual agreement and would reduce opposition to their plans, they would jump at it.

Most developers want to integrate but it seems to me that even when they have meetings with the community, they are a little unwilling to promote their case as they know that the council will want the lion's share.