Yateley Heath Check

Background and Justification

HISTORY & BACKGROUND

In 2002 the Town Centre Management Group decided to carry out a Market Town Health Check on the whole of Yateley. This was to take place in tandem with the YATELEY VILLAGE DESIGN FRAMEWORK which would look exclusively at improvement schemes for the Town Centre. The Assistant Town Clerk was tasked with preparing the Health Check snapshot. At the same time the County Council funded a Shopping Study. Jones Lang Lasalle, commissionned to prepare this study, reported the results to the Town Centre Management Group in 2002.

Work on the Health Check project had not been completed by the time of the Village Design Framework Workshop Day in September 2004. A direct outcome of the Workshop was the decision to prepare a Parish Plan to feed into the Hart Local Development Framework and Hart Community Stategy. Parish Plans are a 'free-form' planning process. It was therefore decided to drop the Market Town Initiative as being too restrictive to accommodate the special characteristics of Yateley.

On 24 January 2006 a meeting was held with the County Council's Market Towns Coordinator, responsible for rolling out Health Checks in Hampshire, in order to review this decision and to determine whether the Health Check Worksheet methodology might make the objectives of the eight topic groups easier, and quicker, to achieve.

The meeting decided to report to the full Steering Group that accomplishment of the Parish Plan by means of the Market Town Health Check methodology was under review and that a decision would be made after two members (including the Project Officer) had attended the National Conference on Community and Parish Plans on 8 February 2006. Following the national conference a strong recommendation was made to the Steering Group to adopt the MTI approach to produce the community plan for Yateley. This recommendation was adopted on 16 Feb 2006.

ADVANTAGES & JUSTIFICATION

The advantages of preparing the Yateley Parish Plan using the Market Towns Intitiative are:

• Yateley is on SEEDA's list of small towns eligible for direct support at the project implemenation stage;
• Topic Groups should find it easier to complete the worksheets, since they act as detailed guidance;
• using Health Check methodolgy would not necessitate opting out of Hart's Parish Plan programme;
• there would even be no need to change the name of the Parish Plan, nor that of the Steering Group:
• the definition of 'market town' is defined by SEEDA, and the town does not need a market, nor a town centre attracting shoppers from its hinterland;
• the resulting Parish Plan will be 'evidence based', improving its status and credibility at the implementation stage;
• DEFRA's Parish Plan process is likely to become more proscriptive, oriented to rural villages of fewer than 3,000.

Key Steering Group members have been provided with a digital copy of the Health Check Worksheets and the preparation guide. Topic Groups leaders have been supplied with paper copies of worksheets applying to their topic. The general public can monitor progress on this website, and may comment on answers at any time.