From the Ciderspace Archive – 9th September 2016
This week has seen Yeovil Town engaged in a sort of an uncomfortable Groundhog Day, where as the legendary film depicts, there is a feeling that what we are all experiencing is a repeat of what we’ve seen before. We may be in September 2016, but it would be possible to pull out certain issues from previous months and years, reword the news items or forum postings from those days very slightly, save and republish and no-one would notice the difference.
The club have had a planning application rejected. In fairness, on this occasion I had presumed this was one that I thought would be allowed through by SSDC, after their Case Officer gave it the thumbs up in the planning report. However, whilst the Case Officer stands as a salaried employee at the Council, those who sit on the committee itself must be elected every few years, and so end up being mindful of the wider electorate, and of the feelings local residents may have on certain subjects, or of the hot potato they might have to deal with if a few years after a Thorne Lane development is opened, a pedestrian gets knocked down, or a problem manifests with the site itself.
Early hints from the committee hearing suggest that those councillors whose wards are closest to Huish Park or the Lufton site were the ones who spoke against it, whilst those who are responsible for regions further away were more happy to support it. Equally, it was the local Brympton Parish Council and the Lufton residents who raised the biggest ‘noise’ about the application – at SSDC level, feedback from the local Council departments was far more favourable. My theory on this isn’t particularly scientific, but it may be that the club need to look at their working relationship with the immediate local parish, rather than necessarily pointing the finger at the wider realms of SSDC.
It’s important because the next time they put in an application which may be seen as credible, then they need to recognise that local residents need to be won over, just as much as football supporters. One of the common themes of the Lufton residents letters were that they did not feel they’d been consulted with prior to the planning application, with all of the focus from the ‘open days’ the club held being on the Huish Park land developments.
So where does it leave the club? As I see it, the main Huish Park development plans – which have now been on pause for twelve months already – cannot proceed with credibility unless the club have replacement pitches for the two training pitches that sit behind the away end. National Planning Policy here is clear – if you concrete over sporting facilities, you have to replace them on a like-for-like basis. If you don’t, then Sport England, part of the Government’s Department of Culture, Media and Sport, have the power to block the application. On top of that, part of the Huish Park site is deemed to be Public Open Space, and another part is operated by the club under a leasehold agreement. Without that also being replaced, again the application wouldn’t get very far. So unless the club have already allowed for the possibility of the Thorne Lane application failing, then it would seem that the main Huish Park plans will sit mothballed for a while.
We are now five years and six months since the club made its original announcement that they planned to build a 3,500 seater stand at Huish Park at the away end of the ground, complete with lavish artist’s impressions of the stand itself and the adjoining retail park. Chairman John Fry has even said in an interview that the origins of the planning applications date back to 2007, whilst the now defunct Invest in Yeovil website and brochure dated from June 2006. At some stage, the club has to consider whether its chasing the right dream.