STOKE POGES TASK FORCE
WWFC Application Information Hub
Planning application PL/26/07779/FA
1. A matter of size
While the proposal affects all four areas shown on the overview map, it is important to compare the scale of the changes.
The eastern part of the golf course would be almost completely transformed to accommodate the new Performance Hub. By comparison, the physical changes proposed at Farnham Park Playing Fields are much more limited.
The difference becomes particularly clear if we compare just the footprint of the Performance Hub with the area occupied by the public sports facilities being improved at Farnham Park Playing Fields.
The Performance Hub occupies approximately eight times as much land as the affected facilities at Farnham Park Playing Fields.
There is another important difference. The Farnham Park proposals principally improve, replace or repurpose facilities which already exist. The Performance Hub, by contrast, would be an entirely new facility for its users while taking over land which is currently part of the public golf course.
In other words, existing users gain improved facilities on the Farnham Park side, while on the Performance Hub land the existing recreational use is removed from eight times the size of those improved facilities.
Any public access to the Hub would be very limited and controlled, and the public would no longer be able to use that land as it does today.
What does the difference in size mean?
Size alone does not decide whether the proposal is acceptable. A hectare of improved public sports facilities does not automatically have the same value as a hectare of golf course that is lost.
But the difference in scale cannot simply be ignored either.
If the benefits at Farnham Park Playing Fields are relied upon to help justify the harm caused by the Performance Hub, then those benefits have to carry considerably more weight per unit of land. With the Performance Hub occupying approximately eight times the area of the affected facilities at Farnham Park, the benefit produced by each hectare improved there would need to be at least eight times as great as the harm caused by each hectare of the Performance Hub, simply for the two sides of that comparison to balance.
That is a demanding proposition.
And it leads directly to the questions explored in the following pages: How much of the claimed benefit is genuinely new? How much is improvement or replacement of facilities that already exist? And how much weight should those benefits carry when set against the development of the Green Belt and the loss of existing public recreational land?