In the new chancellors’ constituency email, Jeremy Hunt admitted the proposed Constituency Boundary changes were a real challenge. He said:
“This week, the proposals for new parliamentary constituency boundaries in England, Scotland & Northern Ireland have just been published by the relevant Boundary Commissions.
I need to understand the implications of the report, which are terrible for me personally. After proudly representing Godalming, Farnham & Haslemere (and their surrounding villages) for over 17 years, it looks like I will have to choose between two halves of a constituency that is basically being cut in two – a frankly impossible and heart-breaking choice. There is now a 4-week consultation, and I will not be rushing this particularly difficult decision.”
Oh, dear! Now poor old Jeremy has something else on his mind other than filling that big black hole in the nation’s finances. Hanging on to his seat?
Here is the proposed split of South West Surrey:
Godalming and Ash Constituency :
This includes Godalming, splits Haslemere in half, and adds Shalford, Shamley Green, and Cranleigh and Ash from Guildford. Ash? Really? Not sure going over the North Downs is something we ever do in Waverley!
Farnham and Bordon Constituency: Farnham adds Headley, Lindford, and Whitehall and Bordon new towns and retains Haslemere East. A whole new growth area and a very different constituency area!
A University town and a new town – may not bode well for a true blue candidate.
It would appear that poor Annette is not the only disgruntled purchaser of the new A2 Dominion Homes at Amber Parkside in Alfold Road, Cranleigh.
There are more -many more! Because defects abound and the whole place is lit up like a Gatwick Runway and the residents will psy the bill! The only place that remains in the dark – is the entrance sign on Amber Park where the lights don’t work!
Our comments page and our mailbox have been groaning under the weight of further complaints and suggestions on how to bring developers A2 Dominion and Waverley Planners to book. However, we understand from an expert that it isn’t a planning matter.
Don’t developers have to adhere to the conditions on their planning consents any longer?
The WW has been researching this developer. It appears that A2 Dominion has permission to build over one hundred homes on the other side of Alfold Road. It had planning consent for 110 homes and has just increased the number by another 36. So maybe we can prevent this misery from happening to other poor souls in the wanna-buy market.
The Waverley Web has stirred up a stink in the village, which, we understand from past newspaper articles, boasts the title ‘Cranleigh Cares.’ Judging by the number of comments sympathising with poor Annette – some still do care.
Perhaps the publicity that has been generated will prompt the three Cranleigh men behind this shocking fiasco to stand up and be counted.
Shame on you, A2Dominion – give them their money back or put these defects right and compensate Annette for all the misery you have put her through!
This is just a sample of the comments we have received. Others we have with-held as some recent purchasers are terrified the value of their homes will have dropped by many thousands.
Our property still has outstanding snags, and we moved in March. Nothing is properly built, and twice, the shower has broken. One time it fell on me in the bath whilst heavily pregnant; the second time, it fell on my 3-year-old and cut all his face and the top of his head. We still can’t put blinds up downstairs due to outstanding work. The front door doesn’t shut properly, the weep vents are fake, there are hundreds of things still wrong, and we were initially lied to when buying as 2/3 of the toilets aren’t suitable for my husband’s disability. It’s been awful from start to finish. Even the other day, I was blocked in from driving to our house by the builders on each end (with three year old and a smelly 4-month-old that needed a change). When I asked them to move, they said,
‘It’s not my problem’.
It’s a shame as we have really loved the new area.
I really hope the lighting issue gets resolved to better the environment and residents’ requests… I can’t imagine the havoc it must be wreaking for the local fauna.
Very much a shameful oversight whilst building a nice eco park right next door! The vision just isn’t matching up!
You should’ve seen the fantastic wildflower beds. Ok, so one bed was wildflowers sown too heavily, but the rest were 4ft high weeds that the developers were insisting were, in fact, wildflowers.
Very interesting reading. Perhaps Angela Richardson could get her teeth into this as well – she is our MP. That personnel involved in the development, I.e. Bamford, Vrijland and Leahy via A2 Dominion, once they’ve got their planning approved, seem to “disappear”! SOMEONE is responsible – perhaps Angela could do a title digging to find out WHO!
There are many more complaints on our Comments Page, and we have given up trawling through all the e-mail messages from disgruntled purchasers of these homes.
PS. since writing this post we have had even more shocking revelations! Watch this space.
What more could anyone want right in the middle of a pandemic and difficulties with BREXIT than a Boundary Commission intent on re-organising our local government institutions and our electoral boundaries?
However, it is not the Commission itself that has abandoned common-sense by instigating the vastly complex and time-consuming review. It is a Government that is hell-bent on reviewing anything and everything. Education – planning; health; local government; promoting unitary authorities and more!
You name it – they want to change it – in the middle of the most catastrophic disease that we have faced in modern times. At a time when our cash- strapped local authorities are struggling to make ends meet
Whilst the rest of us are adding blubber, if the Commission has its way, our borough council will be losing weight. By that, we mean losing councillors – down from the existing 57 in 29 wards – to 50 and fewer and larger wards. So presumably in 2023, there will be a slimmer Waverley – or possibly NO Waverley – as it is still Surrey County Council’s intention for the whole county to become a Unitary Authority. It is hanging onto its fervent desire to get rid of the county’s 11 boroughs & district councils. This despite being told by Government to shelve its ambitions for the time being.
Your Councillors
Waverley Borough Council has 57 seats, representing local people in 29 wards that make up the Borough.
Councillors are elected by the community to decide how the council should carry out its various activities. They represent the wider public interest as well as individuals living within the ward in which he or she has been elected to serve.
Each councillor is elected for a four-year term. The most recent elections took place on 2 May 2019. The next Waverley Borough Council elections will take place in 2023.
Councillors have regular contact with the general public through council meetings, telephone calls or surgeries.
According to the council’s website, Fifty-six borough councillors are members of a political party registered with the Electoral Commission; one is Independent. They are currently divided as follows:
Councillors are not paid a salary for their work, but they do receive allowances. By law, all members of the Council are required to complete a declaration of interest form, the details of which are published annually.
In 2018/2019 the council paid out £395,000 in Basic Allowances, Special Responsibility Allowances, Travelling and Subsistence Allowances. it also included just £3,000 on internet charges.
in 2019/20 the figure was £397,000 – which WW believes is amazing value for money. This is low, compared with many other councils across the country that pay considerably more.
‘No community wants this’: Sussex new town plans anger local Tories
Although the Waverley Web mainly concentrates on all things Waverley/Surrey – the county is not an island and development on Waverley’s borders – e.g. Bordon – affects all our lives here in Farnham.
This scheme in Adversane adjoins the Surrey/Sussex border near Loxwood and Dunsfold and would mainly access the A281 Guildford to Horsham Road.
The scheme named Kingswood for nearly 3,000 new homes assembled by Sir Michael Hintze, who has given £4.6m to the Conservatives is a hop, skip and a jump from Dunsfold’s new garden village (2,600) homes on the former airfield on the outskirts of Cranleigh
Sketches of the proposed new town of Kingswood, on the Surrey/Sussex border. Not to be confused with Surrey’s Kingswood.
Plans for a new town in rural Sussex backed by one of the Conservative party’s biggest donors and close allies of Prince Charles are exposing a split in the Tory party over how to rapidly accelerate housebuilding.
The scheme for 2,850 homes, is being proposed on open fields at Adversane which has been assembled by hedge fund billionaire Sir Michael Hintze who has given £4.6m to the Conservatives. Its design is partly inspired by Poundbury, the ersatz Georgian town in Dorset created by Prince Charles, and Sir Michael Peat, the Prince of Wales’s former private secretary is a director of the development company.
But it is being opposed by local Conservative MP Andrew Griffith, who said:
“it is the wrong type of development in the wrong place” and local Tory councillors who have warned: “No community wants this on their doorstep.”
It looks set to be a test case for the government’s controversial new planning strategy announced last month which is set to relax national planning rules and set significantly higher local housebuilding targets in areas including Horsham.
John Halsall, the Tory leader of Wokingham borough council in Berkshire, which is also facing central government demands to build significantly more homes warned of a high political cost saying
“You won’t have a Tory left in the south or south-east of England.”
Some of the land is owned by Eton College, the alma mater of the prime minister, Boris Johnson. The largest parcel which would be built over is a farm purchased by Hintze for £10m from Mike Stock, the songwriter behind a string of 1980s hits by Kylie Minogue, Rick Astley and Bananarama.
Local opponents say the project – which could ultimately create a town of around 10,000 people – threatens rare wildlife, an increase in car congestion and risks becoming a dormitory for London commuters.
“There is an enormous amount of antipathy to this scheme,” said Julian Trumper, a local resident organising opposition. “Horsham has already taken enough of Sussex’s requirement to build housing and this potential growth is unsustainable. Infrastructure and road and rail links are insufficient. The displacement to wildlife and established ecosystems by building a new town in the open countryside is incalculable.”
The project claims that it will: “focus on building a community for people of all ages and providing a platform for economic opportunity and sustainable growth” and will champion the principle of “beauty” in town planning identified by Sir Roger Scruton in his report to the government on planning and architecture.
Kingswood promises to be a ‘socially inclusive, mixed-income development’ with ‘community at the heart’.
But the row over whether it should go ahead exposes a growing schism in Conservative ranks over two proposed reforms to accelerate housebuilding.
The first is a new planning system that will make it easier and quicker for developers to build on greenfield sites, which Conservative councillors have complained undermines local democratic involvement by proposing zones where detailed planning consents would not berequired.
The second is new inflated house building targets which backbench Conservative MPs and council leaders have criticised as too high and ignoring local needs. The new target for Horsham would see the area required to deliver 1,715 new homes a year, more than double the current target of 800.
The high status of Kingswood’s backers – with close links to the top of government and the monarchy – has also sparked fears that local influence could be further undermined, with opponents citing the planning scandal earlier this year in which it emerged that the housing secretary, Robert Jenrick, backed a project by party donor Richard Desmond against the advice of officials.
In other words, it is not what you know but who you know in the wonderful world of developers?
“After what we saw with Jenrick and Desmond, we have the impression that the property developers are doing all this with barely any local democracy at all.
A spokesperson for Horsham district council said:
“Any site that is allocated in the next step of the local plan process will be subject to full public scrutiny at a public examination conducted by an independent planning inspector. Each site will be assessed to determine whether it is suitable, achievable and available, in a public arena.”
The local Conservative MP, Andrew Griffith, said: “We are building on greenfield, we’re not using brownfield land. This is the wrong type of development in the wrong place. The identity of the landowner is not important. I am giving voice to constituent concerns.”He told a Commons debate earlier this month: “So many of my constituents in villages of every letter of the alphabet, are having their lives blighted by the prospect of inappropriate and unsustainable development”.
Philip Circus, a Conservative member of Horsham council in whose ward the development is proposed, added:
“I am not interested that people are connected with royalty or people that donate to the Conservative party. It cuts no ice with me. We don’t feel any compulsion to doff our caps to anyone other than the residents. This is a rural community which in infrastructure terms does not look like an area for major housing development.”
The Kingswood masterplan has been submitted for inclusion in Horsham district council’s local plan, which is currently out to public consultation. The director of the development company, Dominic Richards, was formerly a director at the Prince’s Foundation for Building Community – the heir to the throne’s architecture and planning charity which promotes traditional urbanism.
In the new chancellors’ constituency email, Jeremy Hunt admitted the proposed Constituency Boundary changes were a real challenge. He said:
This includes Godalming, splits Haslemere in half, and adds Shalford, Shamley Green, and Cranleigh and Ash from Guildford. Ash? Really? Not sure going over the North Downs is something we ever do in Waverley!
Farnham adds Headley, Lindford, and Whitehall and Bordon new towns and retains Haslemere East. A whole new growth area and a very different constituency area! 
