The Council

A review of 2023/24 from Catherine Oliver

2023/24 posed some interesting challenges, around staffing and the Neighbourhood Plan.  We said goodbye to our long serving Clerk; many thanks Ali for all your years of service. We welcomed Louise our Administrative Officer (now our Deputy Clerk), who has been helping Rachel our Finance Officer and myself to keep on top of the work. The internal changes meant we weren’t able to take on as many new projects or make as many improvements within the Parish as we would have liked.  One constant is our warden Dave, who always keeps the Parish clean and well looked after.

Our new Parish Clerk, Paul Johnson joined us in the new year with many years of experience in the NHS.  He has rolled his sleeves up and is getting stuck into all aspects of the Parish and that has allowed me to focus chairing the Council, so we can focus on our community and the strategy for 2024/25.

I would like to thank the all the staff and councillors at the Parish Council for their time, effort and enthusiasm to make Hazlemere a better place to live, work and relax.

Neighbourhood Plan

The Neighbourhood Plan (NP), which gives local people more say on planning decisions in the area, finally went to referendum on the 9^th November 2023. There was a 18% turnout with 86% in favour of approving the NP.

Planning applications

There are still significant numbers of both householder and developer planning applications that the Parish Council are asked to comment on twice a month. We are committed to preserving our beautiful village whilst allowing our residents to adapt their homes to allow them to remain here.

Both the Tralee Farm and Amersham Road sites (known as HW8) were given permissions October 2023.  Building will commence once all legal agreements are signed.

The planning application for Terriers Farm (HW7) has made progress with various iterations of the original submitted plans.  It has yet to be considered by committee at Buckinghamshire Council. We will, of course keep residents up to date with any progress.

Active Travel

We have formed an Active Travel Working Party to look at how we make best use of the footpaths within the Parish.  Our aim is to be able to move around the Parish safely and without using our main roads, that are busy and have narrow footways.

There is a new tenant at Grange Farm who is planning on keeping sheep and fencing off the fields to protect them (with new hedging).  This will hugely increase the biodiversity of the area which the Parish Council gladly supports. This means access to some of the footpaths around the farm will change, but the Parish Council is working with Buckinghamshire Council and the tenant farmer to try and secure an alternative footpath to enable walkers to leave the Hazlemere Recreation Ground and go towards the new scout hut.  We have also taken the opportunity to improve the footpaths in that area so we can all enjoy these green spaces, no matter the weather.

Open Spaces

Our open spaces in the Parish are vital to everyone’s health and wellbeing.  We are constantly striving to improve the quality and safety of these spaces, through improving the play areas to make them accessible to all children.  We maintain the play areas in Rose Avenue, The Dell (or Spinney) and Hazlemere Recreation Ground.  We have also designated 5 areas in our NP as Local Green Space giving them similar protection to Green Belt status.

New councillors

Currently we have no vacancies for Councillors, which is a great position to be in.

There is currently an ongoing consultation to increase the number of Parish Councillors from 12 to 16.  We will have to wait until late this year to find out the result of that consultation.  We want to increase our numbers because we feel that the more Councillors we have, the more improvements we can undertake in the Parish.  As this is a voluntary role, it benefits our community if we have a team that have the capacity to share their workload when other life commitments come up. All of Councillors give up significant time to do this work, and I would like to thank them all for all that they do.

If you want to find out more about us, follow us on social media or visit or website: https://www.hazlemereparishcouncil.gov.uk/

Catherine Oliver

Chair, Hazlemere Parish Council

June 2024