1. BACKGROUND TO ISSUES & OPTIONS QUESTIONNAIRES FOR THE HIGHAMS PARK PLAN
The results of the online Issues & Options Questionnaires that we undertook between 7th June, 2015 and 25th October, 2015 are now available on this page of our website by clicking on the links below.
Before you read the results of the questionnaires we thought it would be useful to remind you of what the questionnaires were all about and where the issues came from, so we have provided some notes below.
(If you don’t want to read these notes you can just skip to the bottom of the page where you can access the links to the results)

A. What were the Issues & Options Questionnaires?
In July 2014 The Highams Park Planning Group (HPPG) was formally designated by the Waltham Forest Council as the neighbourhood forum to prepare a resident led Neighbourhood Development Plan (“the Plan”) for the Highams Park Area. This is a legal designation under the Localism Act of 2011 and this means that HPPG has to follow certain steps in preparing the Plan. You can find out more about HPPG from the “About Us” page of this website.
As the Plan will be resident led, we were advised that it is best practice to consult residents on issues that the plan aims to address through issues and options questionnaires; i.e. asking residents whether they agree that the issues identified exist and, if so, what steps the Plan should take to address these issues by providing some options and inviting residents to comment.

The HPPG did this through the following five Issues & Options Questionnaires:

1. Natural Environment
2. Traffic, Pedestrians & Public Realm
3. Business, Employment & Community Facilities
4. New Housing Development in the Highams Park Neighbourhood Plan Area
5. Sustainability, Housing Estates & Houses in Multiple Occupation

B. Where did the issues in the questionnaires come from?
The issues were selected from the ideas, suggestions and issues raised by hundreds of local residents in the eighteen months preceding the questionnaires; starting with the Launch Event in November 2013 and continuing with ideas sent in via our website and suggestions forms filled in at our stands at Highams Park Day and other local events.

C. How were the issues selected?
The suggestions from local residents were reviewed at regular meetings of members of the Highams Park Planning Group (this initially involved a lot of hard work and thought by around 100 people or more) and divided into different categories, Natural Environment, Transport, etc.
We then discussed the issues and ideas with independent consultants from Planning Aid and with Council Planning Officers to ascertain which can be covered in the remit of a Neighbourhood Development Plan. This determined the list of issues that were included in the questionnaires that we asked you to complete. Another factor in determining what we included was how many local residents had raised the same issue.

Under the terms of the Localism Act a Neighbourhood Development Plan is essentially about establishing planning policies to determine how an area develops. Some of the issues and suggestions from residents didn’t fit within the remit of a Neighbourhood Development Plan (i.e. they didn’t relate to development) but we intend to include some of them alongside the Plan as projects.

We are already trying to help push some projects forward along with Highams Park’s other very active community groups and local Councillors. These include more local events such as Shop Local Day, The Highams Park Christmas Fayre, The Highams Park Festival, Highams Park Live, etc.), as well as lobbying for improvements to the town centre and shopfronts, the station, the Regal and many others.

To try and maximise local residents’ awareness of The Highams Park Plan and what we are trying to do we leafleted 6,000 homes, had articles about the Plan published in the local press (Waltham Forest News, Chingford Guardian, West Essex Life and the Walthamstow Echo) and had a community noticeboard erected by the entrance to Tesco in Signal Walk with information about The Highams Park Planning Group and local events. We now have nearly 900 people on our mailing list. We have also tried to increase awareness by asking the local community Facebook pages to post details of our questionnaires and other things that we are trying to do. In areas that we didn’t get much take up to start with we went and knocked on doors!

D. Why was it necessary to undertake the Issues & Options Questionnaires?
Just because a few residents raised a particular issue doesn’t mean that everyone else agrees with them! So having identified what appeared to be the most important issues, the next step was to test what other people thought about them, and the questionnaires were designed to find out what support there is for these issues and to ask for other ideas and suggestions that we may have missed in our previous consultations.

E. What next?
We have now reviewed the answers and comments from the questionnaires and we will use this information to prepare a first draft of the Plan for local residents to review and tell us what we’ve got right and, just as important, what we’ve got wrong! The draft plan will include:

• A Vision Statement – an overview of what we are trying to achieve.
• Objectives – how we will deliver the vision.
• Policies – to deliver and maintain the objectives and vision
• Recommendations – things that cannot be written into policy but perhaps could be better managed.
• A Delivery Plan – a detailed programme to achieve the Objectives and to make sure the Plan doesn’t just gather dust on a shelf
• A list of priority projects – to achieve the plan and the other projects that are outside the Plan.

2. NOTES ON THE QUESTIONNAIRES & HPPG’S RESPONSES

• Most of the issues put forward received strong support from local residents but this wasn’t surprising as they had come from eighteen months of asking people’s views.
• For some responses, there was no “strong opinion” or people told us that they did not have sufficient knowledge of the issue or Council policies to take a view. We apologise for this, but we had to take a balance between making the questionnaires long and technical (and so risk putting people off completing them) and getting resident’s ‘gut feel’ for what they think needs to be done to improve Highams Park based on their own experience – i.e. if you feel something isn’t right then perhaps the existing Council policies aren’t working or are not being properly enforced.
• We have a record of the names and addresses of all respondents so we can prove to an independent examiner that the comments and feedback genuinely came from local people but, in the interests of privacy, we have removed all the names from the data published on our website.
• Where people accidentally responded more than once, we removed the duplicate responses.
• Where we have put ”Noted” in our remarks means that we have read your comment and will take it into account when drafting the policies and drawing up the list of projects. Please don’t take this as dismissive, but if we had put too much detail in our remarks the documents would be even longer and would take too long to read.
• We have included people’s comments warts and all without correcting any typos . 
• For the avoidance of doubt,  publication of people’s comments does not mean that we necessarily agree with what has been said but we feel that it is only right that all people should be able to express their views freely.

3. CLICK ON THE NAME OF THE QUESTIONNAIRE BELOW TO SEE THE RESPONSES FROM LOCAL RESIDENTS
A total of 432 people participated in the questionnaires and 88 people completed all five questionnaires. In total there were 1,213 responses.
Please feel free to ask us questions about the results, what we aim to do next or raise other issues by emailing us at highamsparkplan@gmail.com .

Thank you to everyone who completed the survey about the café in the park, a lot of the comments and suggestions were very constructive and helpful. The survey closed on 1^st November and there were 611 responses, of which 93.6% were positive, 1.8% undecided and 3.6 % negative.

A summary of the results to the various questions is available by clicking on the following link: CAFE & TOILETS IN THE HIGHAMS PARK – Survey results (1).  For those of you with sufficient stamina for a long haul, the summary includes tables showing respondents’ comments which you may like to read through.

As there seems to be a lot of popular support for this project we are now preparing detailed costings and a business plan to put to the Council to request that the community take over the building. We appreciate that some respondents were negative about a café in the park, so where possible we will try and address their concerns in the business plan.

It is by no means certain that the Council will let us take over the building but we will give it our best shot. If the Council does allow us to use the building the next hurdle will be to raise the funding for the renovation but we are sure the local community is up to the challenge.

We will keep you posted as things develop.

Some of our members have asked for the documents for the Council’s consultation on 20 mph zones in the Highams Park Area to be put on our website so they can direct friends and neighbours to the documents, as it would seem that a lot of people have not received them through their letterbox.

If you wish to take part in the consultation you should click on the links below and print off the response page on the document in which your street is included and post it to the Council by 12th October, 2015

WFC140729_Hale End & Highams Consultation Final v3

WFC140729_Larkswood Area Consultation Final v3