HIRA report for April 2004.
- Tue 23rd Mar 2004
 This month's report from Hayling Island Residents Association covers the topics of :
The HBC Website, Gorse Clearances, Beach Replenishment, Other Tourism Issues & Flat Developments,Web Access to Havant Borough Council
Our Open Meeting on 15th April at the URC Hall, starting at 7.30, will consist of a presentation by HBC staff on how to access the Council’s activities via the internet and your own computer.
Havant apparently has one of the most advanced Council web sites in the country, recently winning an award for its excellence and via this you can obtain information on all aspects of Council business. Thus, minutes of meetings, planning matters and applications, cultural and sporting facilities, benefits and tax issues etc. are all available to the Borough’s residents without the need to go to Havant or to wait because the appropriate official is elsewhere.
This presentation will be of particular interest to younger and working members of the community, for whom time is important and it will give a good background to how to obtain the information you need or want, in a way which will become much more common in the future.
Please come and find out how you can become more involved in the life of the Community, in a way that will be much easier for you than has been possible in the past.
Gorse clearance and related issues
The Hayling Islander has had articles and letters recently about gorse clearance and the impact of English Nature (EN). EN feels, possibly quite correctly, that areas of gorse on the Sinah SSSI are old and need reinvigorating and has embarked on a programme to achieve this in conjunction with the SSSI managers, HBC and the Golf Club. These two organisations then implement the desires of EN via agreed management plans.
People do not always appreciate the aims of these plans and in some circumstances unfortunately, neither do the managers and certainly not the Residents of Hayling.
In the past, the gorse has often been burnt, either accidentally or deliberately, resulting in regeneration under the protective cover of the old and dead stems.
In the area opposite Sinah Warren, large swathes of gorse have been cut down either side of the paths through the area thus widening those paths. In this process however all the protective vegetation, often brambles and other dense quick and low growing plants has been removed thus opening up the old gorse with very long stems to total exposure to intrusion of people and large animals such as dogs. This could be to the possible detriment of the dense undergrowth supposedly desired to provide a nice habitat for birds in particular.
Surely it would have been better to clear only one side of each path initially to allow re-growth with better protection from the wind and to cut out the inner sections of each major area to allow re-growth without such exposure to the wind and other forms of intrusion?
One of the beneficiaries of these larger dry open spaces may be reptiles, in particular native lizards, that are always attractive creatures and interesting to observe. Global warming may also help their cause, but that is another topic that will not be addressed at present.
Incidentally, in the above clearances, many areas of good black-berrying have been destroyed.
Beach Replenishment
Residents may have noticed that the shingle movers have been busy recently restoring the defences at Eastoke. Once again we have the conflict between having good sea defences and a pleasant, sandy beach. Once again I put forward the view that the attractiveness of Hayling will decline unless more emphasis is put on improving the beach, not the toilets or the parking or the volley-ball courts but of the beach i.e. that bit of land between low and high water.
The figure of £2M has been put forward which is or course a lot of money. This figure is highly doubtful as the whole sea defence operation does not cost that much and the requirement is not to dump sand willy-nilly over the whole beach but to do a series of experiments, limited in cost to say £30K p.a. over a period of about five years to establish whether the aim is achievable and how best to do it.
If we could achieve that Hayling would boom and the investments in the other facilities that have taken place over the years, would pay off handsomely.
Other Tourism Issues
I have recently been on holiday to Meribel in France. Here, all overnight visitors are subject to a Tourist Tax of 1 euro per day (c.70p). This is used to provide facilities for visitors amongst which is a free bus service over the whole area of the surrounding villages (about the same area as Hayling). This seems to work very well and the service operates until nearly midnight thus providing transport for people eating out in the evenings.
The whole area is beautifully laid out with strict control of building design and provides a feel that is largely lacking in a place such as Hayling. The Tourist investment is clearly huge, possibly not all to our liking, but the general impression is of a bustling and hugely prosperous tourist economy.
Perhaps we can sometimes learn something from foreigners in spite of the insularity of many people in the UK!
Flat Developments
As we have commented on many occasions, flat development on Hayling is proceeding with steam-roller efficiency. National statistics show that half of all planning applications are for flats, not that people want to live in them, but because that is all that is considered ‘affordable’. The problem in the UK is not that there are not enough ‘affordable’ homes, though that is the current PC view, but that there are not enough homes of all types, affordable or not.
While this debate is being aired, Hayling will get more flats. The application for the Bay View Hotel, ex Wayneflete, a private house will no doubt progress to some conclusion. The other week I observed measurements being made at Dilkusha on the Seafront. On enquiring whether this was a prelude to flat development, I was advised to ‘draw my own conclusions’.
Whatever happens to these locations they must be considered in the light of being very high-profile sites and only high quality development should be allowed to proceed. If there were no shortage of housing generally, good ‘marine residences’ would be the desire rather that yet another block of non-descript flats providing yet another possible ‘blot on the landscape’.
As I have observed before, most of Havant’s immediate response to housing demands are because it has little land of its own and is ‘boxed-in’ by the rural areas of Winchester, Petersfield and West Sussex. Hayling is thus the fall guy for more development whereas, relative to their own very low housing densities, the other regions get away with only minor embarrassment, Winchester’s response being to dump theirs on Havant at Denmead.
I know these views may not be universally held but I believe most of the residents of the Island would agree.
Main Contacts
Main contacts:
Chairman: Paul Fisher 92461412
Membership: Fred Gibson 92466995
Notice Board: Lois Neale 92469339
Reporter: Tony Higham 92464723.
By forum user, Mat
|
