The long awaited Enham Alamein village design statement was approved at yesterday’s Test Valley Borough Council cabinet meeting.

It doesn’t seem like four years since we first asked for approval for residents to carry out work to establish a village design statement. At the time there were no parish council or residents association but local residents spoke to me and my fellow councillor Josie Msonthi saying they were keen to carry out the work and to have the same influence over their environment as residents of other parishes. We got approval to start and organised meetings in the village and set the ball rolling.

The amount of public interest was incredible. I attended the early meetings to establish the groups working on the VDS (as I did with a similar one in Smannell). The excitement was infectious. For the first time residents of the village were being given the opportunity to have a say in what was happening around them and they responded positively and emphatically that they wanted to have that say. The residents took up the ball and ran with it. From that grew the residents association and eventually the parish council.

The results of that four years work on the VDS have now been approved. They show what can be achieved when local residents are given control over their affairs and the success of what they have achieved should be an object lesson for other communities. It should also be a lesson for us as borough councillors for our role should not be to administer the borough for, or despite of, the residents but to enable them to do it for themselves as we have done in Enham.

This is a well researched and universally approved document. I would like to take the opportunity to congratulate all those who worked on it, in the village, from the parish council, from the planning department and from planning aid south who gave so much help in the beginning. They have done a brilliant job and I am pleased the cabinet endorsed the work and accepted the finished document in full.

The recommendations for adoption of the document as planning guidance go to full council in January.