'Think again over Station Approach scheme in Winchester'

This is a high-risk strategy. The council has already spent in excess of £5million on this project since it first emerged in 2015 and achieved nothing.

Circumstances have changed for the worse since the current council resurrected plans and it has still not demonstrated a real demand for new office space.  As others have highlighted, there is a good deal of empty office space available in Winchester.  There is much more in Basingstoke, which has better transport links.  The idea that the economy is suddenly going to take off in 2024/25 and there will be a boom in demand for new commercial property is ludicrously optimistic. That Network Rail has pulled out of the project suggests that a major player in urban regeneration elsewhere does not have confidence in its viability, at least as far as the land it owns.

WCC appears to be more interested in new, long-term, initiatives than delivering on existing schemes.  There is talk of making  Station Approach a place that people will want to linger in rather than pass through but surely the purpose of Central Winchester Regeneration is to enhance the city centre and make it even more the go to destination.  Visitors who arrive in Winchester by train want to visit the key historic sites not the traffic-heavy main arteries around Carfax.  I haven’t found anything in the council’s latest report that indicates that it has a solution to the constant polluting traffic flows there.  New commercial development would just make this worse.

By its own admission the council’s finances are in a fragile state.  Until it recognises what is happening in the real world it is wasting council tax payers’ money in pressing ahead with the current scheme.  It needs to think again.

Martin Holmes

Culverwell Gardens

Winchester