At an extraordinary meeting held last week, Romsey Town Council drew up a lengthy list of objections to the borough’s Core Strategy for the future development of the area.

Town councillors adopted an amended version of a draft document presented by Mark Cooper, outlining Romsey’s views on the strategy. This has now been submitted to Test Valley Borough Council.

The town said the strategy called for “sustainable” development but in its view the most sustainable location for major new housing developments was in the urban zones along the M271, M27 and M3 corridors – not at Whitenap and Hoe Lane, North Baddesley, which TVBC has earmarked for 1,500 and 300 homes respectively.

The Whitenap proposal was the most contentious part of the strategy for Romsey.

The town council felt the development would lead to the loss of high-quality agricultural land, contrary to government planning policies, and would spoil the landscape setting of Romsey and ruin an attractive approach to the town from the south. Building on Whitenap also removed a green buffer around the Broadlands Park.

“The park and the house are of national standing; it is inappropriate that a local housing allocation should encroach on the setting of Broadlands Park,” says the town’s submission.

Town councillors also feared the addition of 1,500 homes represented too great an increase in the town population. Added to the Abbotswood development and the brewery site homes, it would see the population of the town and its immediate surrounds grow to 22,429 – a leap of 33.54 per cent.

This growth in population will bring more traffic and the town council did not see any reference in the core strategy to improving the highway infrastructure to meet this increase.

The town council were concerned by the scale and nature of planned accesses from Tadburn Lane and Whitenap Lane, neither of which it felt was suitable for a housing estate of 1,500 homes.

The core strategy states there ‘should’ be bridge over the railway line to link the Whitenap development to the town centre. The town council felt that the wording of the strategy too vague and there should be a guarantee a bridge would be built if the housing scheme went ahead. Without a bridge residents of the new homes would have to drive south to the Ashfield roundabout and then back north along Mile Wall to reach the town centre, a journey of almost two miles.

The town council felt TVBC was tying its own hands by concentrating almost all of its development for the south Test Valley at Whitenap and Hoe lane, both owned by the Ashfield estate.

If the landowner limited the supply of houses to increase prices, this could slow up the rate at which the new homes would be delivered.

The borough has a target of 502 new homes per year and if it falls behind, other landowners could come in with planning applications to make up the shortfall. The town council believes it would be wiser to have more, smaller-scale developments under construction simultaneously to deliver a steady flow of new homes.

The town council also objected to a blanket designation of Forestry land at Chilworth as a “forest park” for use by the people of Southampton, which it felt would be of no benefit to Romsey. If this land were used for housing, it might take some of the pressure off the rest of the southern Test Valley and Romsey.