Neighbourhood Plan Blog

Totton and Eling Town Council voted in May 2023 to grant us the full amount we need to get our Neighbourhood Plan professionally written up and ready for submission.

In our latest meeting we discussed the needs for the brief, and confirmed that we will be using the Town Council’s tender process in order to find and hire a suitable planning consultant to do this vital work on behalf of the Neighbourhood Plan Committee.

In our last meeting we also discussed the NFDC led consultation on the town centre regeneration. All of the points raised in the report tie-in very closely with the work which we have done, and it is extremely positive that we are all able to work together towards our common goal for a thriving and resilient town that is fit for the future. As always, if you wish to read the full meeting minutes, you can find them here.

We have recently launched an online consultation on the Totton and Eling Neighbourhood Plan, which you can access here:

https://forms.gle/nMDaSwjYKwVbfBD39

This consultation goes through each of the 4 areas of the plan, and what we are currently proposing. The questions ask if you agree, disagree or feel neutral about various aspects of the proposals. You also have several opportunities to write more detailed comments if you wish.

The online consultation takes approximately 20 minutes to complete from start to finish.

We hope that this online consultation survey gives many more residents the opportunity to comment on the current iteration of the Neighbourhood Plan, who may not be able to get to one of our in-person events.

We’re now entering a 6 week consultation period for our Neighbourhood Plan. As part of this process we have made extensive updates to this website, which now show the latest work created by our consultant Richard Lewis.

In-person consultation events

We have two in-person events in October.

1st October at Totton and Eling Community Centre 10am-2pm

14th October at Hounsdown Hall 4pm-7pm

We have also been invited to speak with Rushington Residents Association, and we welcome invitations from any clubs, societies or associations in the town who want to know more about the Neighbourhood Plan.

Our meeting this month was a lovely in-person gathering in the cosy atmosphere of the Totton and Eling Men’s Shed. Amongst the woodworking projects and items stored to be repaired we pulled up our chairs and listened to our independent consultant Richard Lewis tell us all about his work on our Neighbourhood Plan so far, and everything he has researched and discovered.

The biggest thing that Richard wanted to convey is that a Neighbourhood Plan document is a land-use document and should be a positive force for developments that we want in our town. We went into a lot of detail, examples and maps during the meeting. If you’d like to read the full meeting transcript you can download and read that here.

Next Stages

Our next stages are to do another engagement event soon, work on drafting our policies over June and August, and doing a 6 week public consultation in the Autumn. After that we will finalise our plans and submit to NFDC. We are aware that Neighbourhood Plan referendums are usually held alongside other elections, and we have council elections in May 2023 which are achievable for us to aim for.

Presentation at Full Council Meeting

A shorter version of this presentation and updates is going to be given at the Totton And Eling Full Council Meeting on Wednesday 25th May to ensure that all councillors are up to date on our work and upcoming stages. A version of the presentation given at the council will be available on this website shortly.

Our March meeting was a very positive affair.

News from NFDC

We began with the news that NFDC have announced they will be putting money into redeveloping the town centre. While we have suspected news on the horizon for some time due to all the big developments happening around us, this is very welcome news and we are excited to work together with NFDC on community consultation.

Updates from our independent planning consultant

We next had an in-depth update from our independent planning consultant, Richard Lewis, on the strategic work they are doing for us at the moment and the work they have planned up until the end of April. Richard also talked to the committee about setting a date for a site visit around the town centre for mid March to help feed into his report.

Areas where we can improve links

We spent the next part of the meeting brainstorming areas where we can improve links for existing walks.

Next consultation

We have begun making plans for our next consultation event – watch this space for more details soon.

As always, if you’d like to read the full transcript from the meeting you can view it here!

We eased into the New Year with a short and sweet meeting this week, yet it was nonetheless filled with a number of key decisions and updates.

Meeting with NFDC

Several of our team are going to be meeting with the planning team at NFDC to better understand how our work can intersect and how we can best support each other. The team are very keen to meet with and work more closely with NFDC, and hopefully this meeting on 24th January will be the start on that journey.

Next Consultation Event

We also decided to organise another consultation event. We are planning for this event to be held in Calmore on a Saturday in June.

Facebook Page Coming Soon

Thinking more about how we communicate with the community we’re going to set up a Facebook page to help make it easier to send out regular updates to interested residents.

Bringing on an independent consultant

The biggest decision we made is to hire an independent consultant to do some work for us. Our next meeting in February will be focused around writing the brief for this piece of work. We feel that it’s a ripe time to get some professional input and guidance in pulling together what we already have.

You can read the full minutes of the meeting here.

The town council recently hired a consultant to look through all the work that has been done on the Neighbourhood Plan so far to help give us pointers on what to do next. Most of November’s meeting was spent going through that critique and forming a plan of our next steps.

We have roughly £8000 of budget currently, and in light of the advice we’ve been given we’re going to use a chunk of that to hire a consultant to write up a draft Neighbourhood Plan for us. We’re at a stage now where we have a great deal of information recorded and evidenced, and it’s time it was drawn together by a planning professional for us. Once that has been done we’ll be in a good position to look at filling in any gaps.

Thinking about how we work

We’re also still thinking about the structure of our committee. We’re very keen to see more residents holding committee positions or being a joint-chair of the Neighbourhood Plan. This is something we’ll be focusing on again in our next meeting, and how we can support sustainable and effective work on the Neighbourhood Plan by all our volunteers.

Added to the pot – heritage buildings & housing mix

We made a start on discussing the heritage buildings of Totton and Eling that we’d like to list and include in our Neighbourhood Plan. We also had a discussion about what we can say more generally about housing across Totton and Eling. We talked about how one of our great strengths as a town is how much diversity we encompass, and how we’d like a housing mix in the future that continues to reflect that and to allow that diversity to continue and thrive.

Coming up – discussions for our next agenda

In our next meeting (or two) we will be discussing

• Heritage buildings in Totton and Eling that we’d like to see protected

• Envisaging policy ideas (i.e. campaign to promote cycling)

• How climate change will affect Totton and Eling

Our next meeting will be on Tuesday 4th January at 7pm. We are still sticking with zoom meetings for now, as we’re finding them more accessible and it allows us to be flexible with group size. If you’re not on our mailing list already contact us and we’ll make sure you receive the zoom invitation!

There has been a lot of activity going on behind the scenes lately, with members of the Neighbourhood Plan team having meetings with New Forest District Council, Hampshire Highways, and Totton and Eling Town Council.

One of the biggest takeaways from September’s Neighbourhood Plan meeting was the sense that the work of the Neighbourhood Plan group is proving more and more valuable to Council officers, and they know to talk to us if they want to consult residents. You can find the full minutes/transcript of the meeting here.

As of the time of writing this blog, we have another presentation to give to the Full Council of Totton and Eling Town Council. Any residents who are interested in hearing our full presentation can go to the Palm Room of Totton and Eling Community Centre at 7pm on Wednesday 29th September. As well as giving an update to our town councillors there will also be a discussion about the future of the Neighbourhood Plan group, and the support we need to continue. You can view the Agenda/minutes of the Full Council meeting here when they become available.

New Chair of the Neighbourhood Plan Group

Our last announcement is that our current chair Caroline Rackham will be stepping down. Caroline has done a fantastic job at steering the Neighbourhood Plan group over the last 2 and a half years, and we’re very pleased that while she has decided it’s the right time for her to step down as chair that she will remain an active member of the committee.

Are you interested in standing for Chair of the Neighbourhood Plan group? If you have any questions please get in touch with Caroline who will be happy to speak with you. The position is open to any interested residents. Candidates will be invited to speak to the group at the next Neighbourhood plan meeting, before the committee votes in the new chair.

On the 31st July we held our first in-person consultation event since the start of the pandemic. The event was a big success, with more than 40 people coming to speak with us and join in our activities to get people thinking about the future of Totton. Special thanks to Richard Lewis for designing the consultation poster for us, and to all the committee members who helped to spread the word.

Collecting your views makes a huge difference to our work, often providing us with new ideas or giving us a better sense of what people like or feel about various options and proposals. This is all data that we can collate and present as part of the Neighbourhood Plan, and also information that we can feed to the Town Council, District Council and County Council.

This website has now been up and running for almost a year, and we hope that many residents have had the opportunity to take a look through some of the information here. This website is intended to be a holding place of key information, including what a neighbourhood plan is, and some overviews of what the plan looks like so far.

We’re keen to increase our accessibility and outreach going forward, and we hope that this blog can provide some easily digestible information and key updates that can be shared online easily.

We’re racking up a good few years of work on this project now, and things are really starting to come together. We started with general consultations to gather information, drafted our initial plan, and are consulting on that initial plan and making amendments. As things are now fleshing out, we are bringing in more stakeholders and looking at more ways that we can present our findings in an accessible way (such as making our meeting minutes available).

Check-in with our blog for more updates in the future. And as always, if you want the full scoop then please come to a future Neighbourhood Plan meeting (open to all residents of Totton and Eling).