"Claygate: The Way Forward” (CTWF) has met with a huge response from Claygate residents.
The initiative was created by the Claygate Village Association (CVA) in the wake of Elmbridge Borough Council’s (EBC) attempt to push through a redevelopment of the Torrington Lodge car par park, in the heart of Claygate, without consulting residents.
Claygate residents defining what they want their village to be
More than 200 residents attended the launch of the CTWF initiative at CVA's Annual Meeting in November. Over 90 people have now signed up to do the hard work of research, idea generation, analysis and communication being carried out by eight working groups. And more than 50 have already attended at least one working group meeting in person.
CVA Trustee Steve Wells described the response as “an amazing level of engagement by Claygate residents who now have a real opportunity to contribute to proper consultation on what Claygate is and should be”. He said that the previous lack of consultation had touched a nerve, and all can benefit from the flexing of resident influence now that Elmbridge Council is working in partnership with the Claygate community.
Eight working groups on the issues that matter to Claygate
The working groups are focused on specific village topics:
· Shops and businesses
· Transport and parking
· Housing
· Leisure and recreation
· Health and wellbeing
· Environment
· Torrington Lodge car park
· Communications and resident engagement
Put together, the work of these groups will provide a view of what Claygate residents, those who work in the village and those who visit here, want Claygate to be like. The leaders of the CTWF initiative see the output from the eight groups overlapping so that a holistic picture of our village emerges. CVA Trustee Nigel Cartwright described the contributions of the working groups like “Lego models”, which can fit together and be merged into a larger village-wide model while still retaining topic-specific depth of detail.
The members of working groups bring a wide range of expertise and experience, all of which is being harnessed. Several are now seeking survey data to help generate ideas and a comprehensive village-wide survey will be launched shortly with follow-up focus groups as required.
Next steps – gathering Claygate people’s opinions, thoughts and needs
We are aiming at delivering a rich, holistic statement of residents’ needs and priorities to EBC by May 2024, after the next council elections, to feed into the Council’s own consultation process. However, some of the key issues are already emerging – notably, parking/transport and housing.
It is very important that the CTWF initiative is inclusive of the needs and views of all sections of the community. We particularly want to make sure that the voices of young people and busy working families are heard, and we are working on channels to capture everyone’s input.
LATEST NEWS – Two of our team, Brian Howells and Adrian de la Touche, met with the Leader of the Council, Bruce McDonald and senior Council officers on 18th December. EBC welcomed the work CVA is doing and recognized CVA’s ability to reflect the feelings of the Claygate community. EBC is looking to CVA to feedback the “general consensus” of what Claygate wants. The Council will be setting up a series of “stakeholder workshops” in January, and CVA will be represented on each. EBC’s aim is to distil all the ideas and use them to inform its own proposals, which will then be subject to a broad consultation exercise in the summer.
Would you like your voice to be heard? Please get in touch via the Contact form or by emailing us on claygateresidents@gmail.com if you have ideas, opinions or would like to help in the work we doing on Claygate’s future.
We wish everyone a very Happy Christmas!