Comment

Representation ID: 1719

Received: 08/07/2008

We appreciate that resolving all the critical input will be difficult. It may seem that we have stressed the negative without welcoming the better elements. This is an unfortunate outcome of time-pressured consultation.

To resolve this, communities need to feel they have more than one bite so to speak to influence policy & it is clear at this stage they do not feel this. House building, retail space & employment centres are essentially private investments on a large scale undertaken by agencies with often little direct stake in Hastings beyond profit realisation.

At the last AMB, Silverhill's community delegate's telling contribution to the meeting was that she & her community were preoccupied with one thing: the large retail development proposed. All discussion was shut down & she will have left that meeting convinced that the AMB is incapable of serving her community to any end. PA37, surely one of the easilest to realise as it is within our control & resources, is actually one of our biggest challenges.

If however, we take the new youth officers mentioned above we catch a glimpse of the community involvement which this strategy neglects. Development also includes institutions & facilities within which communities must partake if they are to be sustainable & successful: schools (or more acurately academies), colleges, green space, health centres, community centres, heritage preservation. Other areas have also strengthened community engagement in housing solutions too.

if communities are not sufficiently empowered & directly linked to these, then the ability of local needs to influence external investment for the better is sharply diminished. Disempowered communities become hostile agents to development & this hostlity in turn destroys cohesion as minorities within these communities perceive the disadvantage this entrenches.

At this stage we are proposing 3 key tasks to address this:
*A series of community workshops to investigate the disquiet over the gap between the headline vision & preferred approaches with a view to strengthening a more holistic approach. We would be happy to be involved in organising these.

*This could lead to development of 'planB' strategies whose focus is much more on smaller scale change within specific locales & which privilege preservation of local character & valued assets.

*A more rigorous explanation of the sutstainability appraisal matrix.
Silmultaneously this needs to be linked to structures which allow for facilitated community input (forums, HCN, AMBs & LSP) into annual reasessments. At the same time AMBs need to develop ways of articulating discussion of development policy.

We hope this might go some way to eliminating some of the ambiguous phrasing in the document & hence a better understanding of ownership within our community of all the objectives & their preferred approaches.