HIRA Report for April 2005

- Mon 4th Apr 2005

Liveability Programme Meeting to Present Benefits Coming to Hayling.

At the quarterly HIRA meeting to be held in the URC Hall on 21st April at 7.30, presentations will be made on the programmes that have now been agreed for improvements to Hayling. These mainly relate to the outdoor environment in which we live.

Various Island residents and council officials will be present to explain how the programme was conceived, developed by the HI Community Board and will now be implemented with inputs from interested parties.
All meetings have included public sessions and residents have been, and are still being, requested to put forward their ideas before the specifications for the various works are finalised. This meeting may be the last real opportunity for significant changes to be incorporated.

The highest profile items will be the proposed redevelopment of Eastoke corner and that providing for much better information to encourage people to use the many rural footpaths on the Island. These activities will all be publicised by an improved 'corporate image' for Hayling tourism.

The first meeting to agree the location of exercise points along the beach has already been held. With luck, these should be in operation by June. If these are successful more may be provided.
Please come out in force to find out what is being done in your name. Make the meeting as good as was our January one on tourism.

Tourism.~
Following on from the last point in the previous paragraph, I have just returned from Meribel in the French Alps. This resort is almost totally dedicated to snow sports. However it also has magnificent facilities for walking, swimming, entertainment, eating etc. as well as mountain biking in the summer.

Its primary season is 5 - 6 months, which is similar to Hayling.  It is in severe competition with all the other snow sports centres in the Alps of which there must be hundreds, also similar to Hayling in terms of South coast resorts. The architecture of the resort is immaculate, all in keeping with the location, even if some apartment blocks are seven stories high. The tourist office is like a cathedral and everyone spends far more money than they probably wish or should because the environment is so attractive and conducive to the abandonment of financial restraint.

There the contrast ends. Hayling is often dowdy but we hope the Eastoke corner development will improve this in that area and point the way forward for others. The general tenor of Hayling makes few people say we must go to Hayling, the tourist office is hardly impressive and the main attraction in the past, the sandy beach, has all but disappeared. We MUST improve the Beach. Everyone seems to regard this as impossible, but I do not. Many resorts spend large sums of money on maintaining the quality of their beaches. At our January meeting, we were told that tourism revenue in Havant had gone from the usual £50M or so of previous years to £130M. Personally I find this latter figure hard to believe but, if it is true, we can easily afford to improve the beach to almost any standard we wish. (Others may of course say that if we are making so much money already, why bother!)

With kite- and windsurfing now dominating the Western end of the beach, perhaps we should concentrate efforts to provide superb facilities for the 'bucket and spade' brigade between the funfair and the coastguard station. One thing we could easily do is to provide areas of sand behind the shingle bank rather than in front of it. This feature effectively exists by the volleyball court and provides much pleasure for families.

 In comparison to Meribel, Hayling will never be in quite the same league but, as we are always being told, local tourism should be based on water sports and so we should embark on a much higher profile programme to bring this about.

We need aggressive marketing of holidays, not day visits. These should offer participants the chance to try any of the local water sports over a 6-day period. We do have professional sailing schools on the Island and we certainly have very professional sailing, kitesurfing and windsurfing club activities. Are these really co-ordinated so that people will say 'I MUST go to Hayling, I want to try at least three water sports during my week's stay'. If we could offer this type of holiday we could extract £500+ per week from such people, this being is the sort of level needed for a successful tourist economy. If anyone is offering this type of service on the Island, please write to the Hier to publicise the fact and allow others to inform their friends!

Enough of tourism, let's get on to the Council Tax increases.

Council Tax Increases.
 
Most people will have had these pushed through their doors. The eternal wonder is why these always exceed inflation? Havant Borough's in particular is very high this year. As I noted in an earlier article, the Fire and Rescue budget was a model of restraint and useful information.

In contrast, those of the County Council and the Police were lacking in information and were often deliberately obscure. As I have already noted, the Police budget, in 2003/4 had some £9M for items that included extra pension and NI contributions, salary increments and Police reform, some 4% of the budget. Perhaps these items were needed. In 2004/5 all the previous year's extra items were lumped into the new budget, inflation added and a new figure derived. But there were further special items, £8M that included salary and pension increments etc. In 2005/6 the extras in the previous year were again added into the budget and increased by inflation, (always higher than the historic rate). This year there are special costs of some £5M that include, you've guessed it, salary increments and pension contributions.

Each of these 'extra items' each year typically doubles the increase compared with inflation, but more worryingly, there are now three year's worth of special costs built in to the budget over just this small period of time. Imagine how doing this year after year increases council tax!

Some better method of monitoring local organisations' budgets is long overdue, the trouble being that must people involved in these processes have vested interests in keeping this sort of activity going as it enables them to be seen to provide services that may not otherwise be possible.

I pass no comment on the HCC and HBC contributions to Council Tax as I have not had the chance to scrutinise them in sufficient detail. However, without this type of approach to budgeting, I do not suppose HCC could ever find the money to pay for the leisure bridge, so such goings on may sometimes have a brighter side.

However, do not despair, summer is coming so let's make the best of it. With the reduced parking charges on the beach, perhaps Hayling will have a bumper year and the extra money will pay for the improvements that we all hope for on the Island.

Tony Higham.
Main contacts:
Chairman: Paul Fisher 92461412
Membership: Shirley Adams 92462881
Notice Board: Lois Neale 92469339
Reporter: Tony Higham 92464723.

By forum user, PaulFisher