Village Survey

Latest News on the Parish Survey regarding the Hub

The Parish Council have now received surveys from those that retuned a form and have issued a summary of the results. The PC have the full results for those that are interested.

There was a high level of support for the Club Shop from people who already use it and who intend to carry on using it. The same group are generally against the Hub, and we think this is because they believe that the retail element of the Hub will threaten the viability of the Club Shop - but this is only an assumption - the survey didn’t find out precisely what was behind people’s motivations.

There was a pretty good level of support for the Hub proposals ‘as proposed’ - not as great as the number of people supporting the Club Shop and against the Hub - but still a significant cohort of respondents.

The number of people who wanted to see some improvement to the facade of the village hall was very significant, and greater than the number that supported the Hub ‘as proposed’.

There was also a very significant number of respondents prepared to volunteer to work in a community-run retail offer of some kind, as proposed by the Hub.

The survey did not return any points of view about the full range of benefits offered by the Hub apart form the retail unit - eg: accessibility to the range community facilities generally, new power supplies, the new bus stop and notice board, highways matters, cycle racks, disabled parking, safe refuge etc. These aspects of the Hub proposals did not feature in the questions posed by the survey so we didn’t discover what people think about these village issues specifically.

What’s next?

The PC are arranging a meeting to discuss how the various views expressed in the survey returns can be brought together into a cohesive set of proposals for the front of the village hall. This is to include representation from the Hub. There is no date or agenda fixed for this meeting yet. It is highly likely that the meeting will be mostly concerned with exploring some type of compromise to the approved scheme so it is hard to predict if a revised version will offer all or some of the original benefits. It is also hard to predict if the final package would have enough widespread community benefit and significance to attract the kind of funding required - we will have to wait and see how forward-thinking the contributors and the final plans are.

Of course any change to the approved scheme will require detailed planning consent so when a revised scheme is agreed in principle the next step will be to re-apply for planning consent and go through the whole process again.

So, unfortunately, we will all have to wait for 6 months or so before we know what the Parish Council wishes to move forward with - but hopefully some of the original thinking will still be intact when this happens.

Meanwhile, if you were one of those people that support the Hub concept, thank you for your trust and community minded positivity - hopefully it will not be wasted in the long run.