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TITLE OF REPORT: THE REVIEW OF GRAVELEY PARISH
REPORT OF THE CHIEF EXECUTIVE
1. PURPOSE OF REPORT
1.1 To assist the Council to determine future governance arrangements for the Parish of Graveley.
2. FORWARD PLAN
2.1 This report does not contain a recommendation on a key decision but has been referred to in the Forward Plan to assist in ensuring compliance with the requirement for publicity.
3. BACKGROUND
3.1 The attention of the Council is drawn to the following extract from a report to Council on 25 February 2010. Following consideration of that report, the Council agreed to proceed with a Community Governance Review.
Extract – Council 25 February 2010 Community Governance Reviews, Report of the Chief Executive.
The Parish of Graveley
3.3 Consideration was given to a request to review this parish in 2003. It was decided to wait until Great Ashby had developed more fully and to give time to assess the needs of that growing area. It is now clear, in terms of the Government’s guidance, the Parish of Graveley displays key reasons for conducting a review. These include the presence, in the same parish, of two physically separate communities whose only common factor is containment within the ancient field boundaries which form the parish. However, this is not to suggest that this spatial arrangement cannot provide effective and convenient governance. It will be for the review to recommend whether or not the existing arrangements should continue, be enhanced or replaced.
3.4 Since 2003 interest in reviewing the parish has waxed and waned as particular individuals have joined or left Graveley Parish Council. A formal request to review was received on 2 June 2009. Present interest is such that, should the Council decline the request, it is expected that a petition would follow quite quickly afterwards. A valid petition would commit the Council to undertaking and making public a review within 12 months of receipt of the petition. In addition, the imperative set out in paragraph 3.3 above would suggest that a review ought to be undertaken even without a petition being received.
3.2 Consequently, a Community Governance Review of the Parish of Graveley is currently being undertaken. A stage in the timetable has now been reached where the Council needs to agree and publicise draft proposals. The main aim of the review is to provide effective and convenient local government.
4 CONSIDERATIONS
4.1 This report contains the following information for consideration:
1) The analysis of an independent survey. The survey was conducted by Electoral Reform Services who have also provided the analysis (Appendix A);
2) Notes of a Meeting of the Graveley Parish Community Governance Review Member Working Party (Appendix B);
3) an extract from the Minutes of a meeting of Southern Rural Area Committee (Appendix C);
4) within the body of the report, technical advice from the electoral services and planning departments within NHDC.
5 KEY ISSUES
A parish for the area known as “Great Ashby”
5.1 Although there is no formal boundary for what constitutes that part of the parish known as Great Ashby, it is clear that the area straddles both Stevenage Borough and North Hertfordshire District. It should be noted that a civil parish which straddles district boundaries[1], cannot be created. Nor can communities be moved between primary local authorities as a result of a Community Governance Review. Such alterations would need to be made by the Secretary of State following a “Periodic Electoral Review”, unlikely in this area within 20 years. Concern regarding this point has been expressed by the Southern Rural Area Committee Appendix C). Therefore, to create a parish for Great Ashby within the current Graveley Parish would mean parishing the North Hertfordshire part which represents approximately 75% of the geographical are Great Ashby.
5.2 This situation pertains to many areas of the Country where urban areas have spread across local authorities boundaries into rural areas. The existing Great Ashby Community Group is a good example of how a community can work across local authority boundaries and it is not expected that parishing the North Herts. part would act as a barrier to community cohesion.
Two parishes for “Great Ashby”
5.3 Theoretically, it would be possible to create two parishes – one in North Hertfordshire and one in Stevenage, which then share a common parish council, in the same way that Caldecote and Newnham remain legally two civil parishes yet share a parish council, as do Rushden and Wallington. Such an approach would be reliant upon residents of the Stevenage side of the boundary petitioning for a “Great Ashby within Stevenage” parish or the Borough Council recommending the creation of such a parish in parallel with the creation of the “Great Ashby within North Hertfordshire” parish and then getting the two new parishes to agree to share a common council. This is a convoluted approach lacking any degree of certainty and has not emerged as a suggestion from any quarter.
Renaming the existing Graveley parish and creating wards
5.4 The driving concern behind the request for the current review is the effect of Great Ashby on the existing Graveley Parish Council and a sense that the existing community of Graveley is in danger of losing effective representation given that the overwhelming majority of the parish’s population lives in Great Ashby rather than Graveley village or the rural parts of the parish.
5.5 It would be possible to split the Graveley Parish into wards. Parish councillors would be elected by ward rather than the parish as a whole. This would ensure that Graveley village retained representation on the council. Such an approach has been taken elsewhere in North Hertfordshire – Codicote, St Ippolyts, Offley and King’s Walden are all split into parish wards.
5.6 The situation at St Ippolyts is similar to that at Great Ashby. St Ippolyts, North Ward covers the part of St Ippolyts Parish into which the urban area of Hitchin has spread, whilst St Ippolyts South Parish Ward covers the rural part of the parish and the old villages of St Ippolyts and Gosmore, thus ensuring both parts of the community are represented on the parish council. Similarly, the warding at Offley and King’s Walden parishes ensures that the villages of Cockernhoe and Breachwood Green are represented at parish council level despite not being parishes in their own right. However, notwithstanding the fact that the population of the Graveley Village Ward (electorate 398) would be assured representation, it would be merely symbolic, as the size of the electorate of the Great Ashby Ward (3,738) would provide for an overwhelming number of seats on the Council from that area.
Creating a parish for Graveley Village and de-parishing Great Ashby
5.7 It would be possible to split the parish and create a new parish representing the historic Graveley Village area and retain the existing parish council arrangements which have served that rural community for a considerable time, prior to the building and expansion of Great Ashby. This would leave the North Herts part of the Great Ashby estate unparished with a status similar to Baldock where both urban and rural areas are served directly by the District Council and an area committee of the Council. The NHDC Southern Rural Community Development Officer and the Community Facilities Manager would continue to support both the Great Ashby Community Centre Management Association and the Great Ashby Community Group. This option has received little support from the respondents to the survey.
Establishing a boundary between Graveley and Great Ashby
5.8 Proposals to create new parishes, wards or to de-parish each raise the question, what would be an appropriate line on which to draw a new boundary? There are a number of factors to consider, including historic geography, postal geography and statistical geography. These considerations apply equally to each scenario.
Historic geography
Not to scale – Mapping is Crown Copyright © 100018622 2009
Figure 1: Civil parish boundaries (red) and historic parish boundaries as depicted on first edition Ordnance Survey map (blue)
5.9 The modern parish of Graveley (shown in red on Figure 1) has a long protruding ‘peninsula’ which contains the Great Ashby area. Looking back to the historic parish boundaries as shown on the first edition Ordnance Survey maps of the mid 1800s (shown in blue on figure 1) it is clear that the parish used to be considerably wider at this point, but a large area of land immediately south of Great Ashby, including parts of the Pin Green business area and St Nicholas estate, as well as much of the Stevenage side of Great Ashby has been ceded from Graveley parish to Stevenage at some point. Graveley parish also used to extend down to Coreys Mill Lane and there also have been minor alterations along the western boundary with the former parishes of Little Wymondley and Willian. Conversely, the north-eastern boundary of Graveley where it meets Weston parish does not appear to have changed since the first Ordnance Survey map – and given that boundary amendments prior to the creation of civil parishes in the early 1890s were rare, this boundary between the Graveley and Weston parishes is likely to be of considerable antiquity.
5.10 The area which forms the eastern peninsula of Graveley parish was in fact at one time a separate parish – Chivesfield (these days better known as Chesfield) – which was absorbed into Graveley parish in 1445. However, it has not been possible to locate any maps showing the extent of the former parish of Chesfield, even assuming that any accurate plans survive from that period. The ecclesiastical parish of Graveley is today still legally called “Graveley with Chivesfield”. The former parish church of Chesfield, St Etheldreda’s, was partially demolished sometime after 1750 and its ruins are one of Graveley’s interesting features.
Postal geography
5.11 An important part of the sense of identity in an area is derived from the postal address. Great Ashby is not a postal locality in its own right but is within Stevenage for postal purposes. Graveley and Weston are both separate postal localities under the Hitchin post town. The address points covered by each postal locality are shown in Figure 2 below, along with the modern civil parish boundaries.
Not to scale – Mapping is Crown Copyright © 100018622 2009
Figure 2: Postal localities:
Stevenage (brown); Weston (purple); Graveley (green); Little Wymondley (blue); Great Wymondley (yellow) and Willian (black). Civil parish boundaries in red.
5.12 It can be seen that there is a very strong correlation between Graveley postal addresses and Graveley parish – there are no Graveley postal addresses outside the civil parish, and with the exception of Great Ashby all postal addresses within Graveley parish are postally deemed to be Graveley too. Given that the Post Office does not automatically follow administrative boundaries in setting addresses, such correlation is remarkable.
5.13 The rural addresses closest to Great Ashby all fall within other postal localities – Warrens Green, Tilekiln Farm and Dane End all have Weston addresses, whilst Chesfield has a Graveley address.
5.14 It is quite clear that all the Stevenage addresses within Graveley parish are associated with Great Ashby, all being contained within that area of the parish east of Weston Road.
Statistical Geography
5.15 The Office for National Statistics splits the country into several areas for statistical purposes. The smallest of these is the ‘output area’. Such areas are used as the building blocks in the preparation of practically all local-level statistics which are published. The civil parish of Graveley is subdivided into six output areas, shown in Figure 3.
5.16 It can be seen that four of these six output areas within Graveley parish comprise the Great Ashby area, whilst the other two split Graveley village and the rural area of the parish between them. To the north-east of Great Ashby is a large output area within Weston Parish which includes the hamlets of Warrens Green and Halls Green and the rural area thereabout.
5.17 Therefore, any attempt to create a Great Ashby area (either parish ward or new civil parish) based on the existing output areas would almost certainly have to be limited to just the four output areas within Graveley east of Weston Road, otherwise large parts of the rural areas of Graveley and Weston parishes would be included.
Possible future development within Great Ashby / SNAP
5.18 There remains the possibility that further growth will be directed in this area. However, the Stevenage and North Herts Action Plan (SNAP) is unlikely to progress at the pace originally suggested, nor in the form previously proposed, given the new Government’s changing stance on housing numbers. If it is the intention to put the new parish / parish warding arrangements in place before the 2011 parish elections, it is highly unlikely that SNAP will have progressed significantly by then, if at all. In the absence of a clear steer from SNAP as to what is likely to happen with respect to the rural areas adjoining Great Ashby, it would be inappropriate to include existing rural properties (which as we saw above all have either Graveley or Weston addresses rather than Stevenage) if there is a possibility that SNAP either does not proceed or proceeds on a smaller scale which does not extend out as far as those properties.
5.19 Given that the purpose of this review relates to electoral representation, the inclusion or otherwise of undeveloped land within the area is largely immaterial. However, one area is worth particular consideration – NES3.
Not to scale – Mapping is Crown Copyright © 100018622 2009
Figure 4: NES3 (dark brown)
NES3
5.20 A planning application has been submitted for the area immediately west of Great Ashby, on the opposite side of the Weston Road to the existing development. The site is currently green belt but this was likely to have been reviewed via SNAP. This application has yet to be determined, but there are a number of concerns with the application notably in terms of highways access and provision of or adequacy of existing facilities, especially schools capacity. The new Government has also started issuing decisions[2] suggesting that increasing housing land supply alone does not override green belt objections and that partial development of a wider urban extension should not progress on a piecemeal basis. As such, there is no certainty that NES3 will proceed in the near future, and even were permission to be granted imminently (which seems unlikely) there would be a delay before the first completions occurred here.