Dever Society AGM 2024 - report
Over 70 people attended the AGM on 11th June at the Warren Centre. Our three ward city councillors were there, together with a number of parish councillors. Cllr Martin Tod, the Leader of Winchester City Council, arrived with Cllr Jackie Porter, which was a welcome surprise. Cllr Porter, who is our area’s Hampshire County Councillor as well as the Winchester City Councillor in charge of the Local Plan, gave us an update on progress on the plan. She said they hoped to publish the next draft of the Local Plan (known as the Regulation 19 draft) for consultation in the autumn and they are not expecting any big changes from the previous, Regulation 18 draft published in autumn 2022. It will not include a new town at Micheldever. Cllr Porter stressed that the public had made it very clear in the City Council’s Strategic Issues and Priorities consultation back in 2021 that it did not want large new settlements in the countryside, so these are not included in the plan.
The City Council has objected to Basingstoke Council’s proposed ‘garden village’ on Popham Airfield; it is apparently very unusual for a neighbouring local authority to object in this way. Cllr Porter also said that the Regulation 19 draft will say that there will be no planning permission given for development on greenfield sites until after 2030; it will be brownfield/previously developed land only before then.
Cllrs Tod and Porter answered questions from the floor, stressing that they opposed the “unsustainable” proposals for Micheldever Station and Popham Airfield.
Ann Bartaby, planning consultant to the Save Popham Airfield campaign, gave an interesting outline of the importance of Popham Airfield as a strategically important general aviation airfield. The All Party Parliamentary Group on Aviation has objected to the ‘garden village’, as has the Civil Aviation Authority and Sport England (the latter because aviation training etc as they carry out at Popham is considered a sport). Apparently Basingstoke council received over 400 objections to the ‘garden village’.
We ended with a very interesting talk on hedgerows from CPRE’s wonderfully enthusiastic Ellie Banks, their Hedgerow Project Officer. She focussed on their Hampshire Hedge Project, which is planting a hedgerow joining up the South Downs and New Forest National Parks. It’s a community project, involving schools, scout groups and volunteers from all over. They are very disappointed that their grant application for the second phase, joining the South Downs NP with the North Wessex Downs AONB (which would have gone through our area), was not successful.