Town Centre Plan - Trust Annual Report 1982
Last year the City Council set up a Working Party of its officers to carry out a Review of Planning in the Winchester Area. The Chamber of Commerce and the Winchester Preservation Trust were each invited to appoint a member to the Working Party as the two organisations most able to represent the range of public opinion bearing on the subject. Although the Working Party has yet to complete its report, a constructive experiment in consultative planning is taking place and several benefits have emerged.
First, the planning officers are able, in the informal procedures of the Working Party, to hear the opinions of interested bodies at an early stage in the preparation of the Plan. Secondly, the representatives of those bodies come to see at first hand just how complex is this planning process and how difficult it is to determine the detailed facts on which such a plan must be based. Thirdly, it has provided a valuable forum in which the Trust and the Chamber of Commerce have been given the chance to learn that on so many issues their respective interests coincide, and that their differences in the past have often been the result of a preconceived and stereotyped image that each has had of the other.
This does not mean that there will not still be held widely differing views on just what sort of development should take place in Winchester. It is wishful thinking to expect that all arguments will come to an end with the publication of the revised Town Centre Plan; if there were to be no differences of opinion, it could even be said that this would indicate complacency rather than enlightenment. On the other hand, it is to be hoped that one lasting outcome of this new consultative planning will be that in the expression of future differences of opinion there will be greater understanding of other points of view, in place of simple reiteration of preconceived and entrenched positions.