Comment: A year to remember

So here we are, the anniversary of a Village Meeting that threw Chilbolton into a state of shock and turmoil. Its impact has rippled through an entire year, threatens to do so next year, and perhaps for years to come. It’s time to look back at an evening in December 2024.

The meeting

The lights were lowered, the projector hummed and the Chair of the Parish Council stepped forward. He was about to unveil a plan that, unknown to the people sitting there, had been in the making for years in conjunction with a local landowner, James Painter.

However, days before the meeting, the scale of the plan, amounting to 168 homes, had mysteriously been leaked. The atmosphere in the room was fervid, and those there waited with intent.

The Chair welcomed the audience and asked that they keep their questions until the end of the meeting. He then outlined how the 25-home development would solve many Village problems: the Shop, the War Memorial, the playing fields, traffic congestion and parking.

More important was that his proposal would avoid “Government imposed housing” and “developer housing for profit”.

Other speakers took over to explain details of the plan. While they did, the Chair anxiously paced the room. He hovered between light switches, windows and thermostats, unwittingly upstaging his colleagues.

When he took over again, sensing tension in the room, he paused the presentation and opened to questions from the floor.

What marked those questions was a mixture of confusion and simmering anger. The meeting never recovered. The presentation staggered briefly back into life, there were more questions, then everything fizzled to an end.

The meeting had been, as others have noted, a debacle. The devastating leak, or “misinformation” as the Chair called it, had revealed the endgame of a development plan that had been years in the making.

The slides at the meeting didn’t speak of that endgame, but described the 25 homes as “Phase 1”. At the meeting the Chair’s hand had been forced. He said that it would be 150 homes, but over a period of 50 to 75 years. Later, when the Parish Council published answers to villagers’ questions, the number fell to 90 to 120 homes “depending on the layout”.

The tantalising question is, had there not been a leak, what would the answer have been at the presentation to the obvious question: “If that’s phase one, what will the subsequent phases bring?”

The consequences

What’s happened since then has been extensively documented in chilbolton.news, but two things are worth highlighting here.

The first is that in June, Test Valley Borough Council allocated 65 homes to be built in Chilbolton as part of their response to increased Government housing targets. Questions over how they had arrived at that number were answered when previously secret documents emerged from the work that led to the December meeting. Parish Councillors, involved in the work, had discussed an almost identical scheme of development with TVBC planners in October 2024.

Second, in August, James Painter decided to go it alone and informed the Parish Council in a letter that he was going to apply to build 25 homes. The plan was based, he said, on the discussions he’d had with the authors of the December meeting.

His letter went unanswered, due to what seems to have been bickering within the Parish Council. Last month Mr Painter upped the ante by making a planning application for 75-homes.

The horrible irony, then, is that the work the December meeting trumpeted, actually led to the two things it claimed it would prevent: “Government imposed housing” and “developer housing for profit”.

It wasn’t all bad

There’s a saying - “hard times create strong people; strong people create good times”, and that has been true in Chilbolton in 2025.

Persistence has been shown to pay off. On the issue of whether declarations of interest actually mean anything, we have come from one woman’s comment that “it’s all a bit smelly”, via a tortuous route, to a point where one Parish Councillor must recuse himself from discussions involving the proposed developments.

We’ve recently had an election. All three candidates said the 5 December meeting in 2024 was a motivator in getting them involved. The 34% turnout was an eloquent rebuff to those who had resisted talk of a referendum on their plans. The two Councillors who were elected are already busy in the the work to oppose Mr Painter’s development.

That portentous meeting also kindled the activism of Cherish Chilbolton. Each sign in the Village saying “No to Painter over-development”, is fruit of the seeds of frustration that were planted twelve months ago.

chilbolton.news too, was born out of that meeting. At it, we were told we’d have known about their development plans, if only we’d taken the time to read Parish Council minutes. Well, we have now taken that time.

What next

We were in the Abbots Mitre two nights ago. It was a hive of activity. In one corner ten residents had met to discuss making comments on the 75-home development.

In another corner, five Cherish Chilbolton team members were making strategy for the coming year. They talked about tactics, too - signs, leaflets and even campaign mugs.

It’s not a scene we would have expected to see a year ago. It was heartening - a community coming together, and one that was engaged.

Do you have some of the concerns rehearsed here? A Chinese proverb says that a journey of a thousand miles starts with one step. In our Village, that step might be to come along to the meeting at the Village Hall at 3pm this Saturday 6 Dec 2025.

We will hear what progress our Parish Council have made in responding to the 75-home planning application.

Our member of parliament, the Rt Hon Caroline Nokes MP, will be there. Maybe if there are enough of us, our enthusiasm might rally her to our cause.

And as a memento of the day, and a tumultuous year, there’s the chance to buy a Cherish Chilbolton campaign mug.