Monthly Archive 25th May 2016

ByMark Davies

Street Reps

The Wheatley Neighbourhood Plan Committee will be using questionnaires to gather the opinions of the people of Wheatley and Holton villages over the next six months. These make for hard evidence. They will not be too long or too many, and will deal with Housing & Land, our Infrastructure, and the Community & its Businesses. We have also started to deliver an initial ‘Mini-Lite’ questionnaire to as many parts of the community as we can. Answers to its three open questions will be evidence of people’s views and hopes for the neighbourhood. Wheatley has 1600 homes. So far we have 28 street reps to deliver to about 20 houses each. If we had 40 Reps to deliver 20 initial questionnaires each, we could reach half the village’s homes. If we had 80 doing the same thing we could cover every home in the village.

Street Reps are the best way to deliver and collect questionnaires. That way, we can be assured that the evidence actually comes back to us and is heard.

The Plan is a non-political, statutory project for consulting the inhabitants about new house building in their Neighbourhood and the human and physical setting into which it will slot. Many communities up and down England are now forming a Neighbourhood Plan.

Would you like to support the community by becoming a Street Rep distributing and collecting questionnaires to say 20 houses in your neighbourhood – or more, or less – according to the time and energy you can offer? If people raise issues for the Plan, you can also put them in touch with the right contact. We have recruited 28 happy Street Reps, but we need more!

Please email info@wheatleyneighbourhoodplan.co.uk if you would like to find out more.

ByMark Davies

Update from the Chair

May 2016

We distributed Wheatley Neighbourhood Plan leaflets in Wheatley and Holton during April, presented our project to the Annual Parish Meeting (20.04), and welcomed over 100 to our first Open Day (07.05) who left us opinions, ideas and concerns in writing we are now analysing (12.05). These include 40 completed initial questionnaires asking three open questions on how people currently see their village. Our first task is to listen to village feeling about the community. Housing and Land Use are our core mandate, including options for the Brookes site after 2021. In September SODC will publish its allocation for new housing here, forecast to be around 180 homes. We will then turn discussion to the pros and cons of developing various sites – and other possibilities. So far 28 ‘Street Reps’ have volunteered to deliver and collect initial questionnaires from neighbours: many more needed and warmly welcome!

John Fox, Chairman WNP Committee