What is a Parish Plan? – and how will it be produced?
A Parish Plan document is merely a clear summary of what village residents have identified as the priorities for protecting and improving the quality of life in their village, backed up by some simple statistics to show how many people in a village have supported each of the main priorities when consulted. The consultation process in Horspath started 4 years ago, but we now need to update it and produce some statistics about what everyone wants, by sending out a Parish Plan Questionnaire for completion by every household, which will ask for your comments on the widest possible range of topics which affect your quality of life in Horspath. Absolutely everyone in the village should join in, by answering this Questionnaire when it is sent round to every household in June, but at this stage, a Steering Group of volunteers is busy choosing the most important questions to go into the Questionnaire. Every organisation in the village is asked to discuss what questions its own members would like to see asked of the whole village population in the Questionnaire, and the Steering Group will try to include as many of these as possible, but no one really wants this Questionnaire to go beyond the 12 pages of questions that some other villages have sent around.

What can you do now? –put your suggestions into the Questionnaire Suggestions Box in the Horspath Village Stores
 Printed below is just a selection of the topics about which questions are often asked in Parish Plan Questionnaires, and the Steering Group would like to have your opinions on this, and your own suggestions. You can write down your ideas in a note and drop it in (anonymously, if you wish) into the Questionnaire Suggestion Box which Mr. & Mrs Patel have agreed to keep available in Horspath Village Stores for the next week or so, or you can tear out the list from this Newsletter and mark that to indicate what you think is most important for residents of Horspath to discuss. All these suggestions will be looked at by the Steering Group, and the most popular ones will be included in the Questionnaire to be sent to every household in June.

What happens after the Questionnaire is completed?
 When the completed Questionnaires are returned, they will be analysed, and the results will be posted on the Horspath Village website (without mentioning anyone’s name) and a Public Meeting will be held in the Village Hall for residents to decide how to convert this new information into an Action Plan, which will set out what people in Horspath want to protect, and how best to improve the quality of life, and how the various Councils should aim to facilitate this. The final Parish Plan will be edited by the Steering Committee, and will be printed and distributed free to every household in Horspath, and a much fuller version, with more illustrations and with all the statistics included, will be posted on the Horspath Village website.

Below is a list of possible topics, in no particular order, which we could consider asking questions about in the Parish Plan Questionnaire to be circulated to every household in Horspath in June 2007:
Community safety – policing, emergency services, Neighbourhood Watch, road safety, traffic calming , speed limits, pavements etc.
Transport – bus service frequency, routes, parking facilities and problems, the children’s journey to and from School etc.
Healthcare – access to surgeries, clinics, hospital transport, nurses, midwives, home carers, facilities for the elderly and disabled etc.
Local businesses – expanding services, the shop, the pubs, the restaurant, the garage, working from home, trades directory etc.
Church & Chapel – the wider community services provided, the upkeep of buildings, community events etc.
Sports & Recreation & Leisure – expanding the sports fields, new pavilion, new sports, fitness walking in the Bowley Field etc.
Clubs & Societies – expand facilities for more young people as well as adults, secure more finance for better facilities, venues etc.
Village Hall – Play Area, building upgrades inside, expand existing uses, coffee/tea shop meeting place, Internet access, CCTV etc.
Education – the Primary School, pre-school nursery, after-school facilities, learning resources, mother and baby facilities etc.
Parish Council – policies, priorities and actions, communicating with residents, village projects etc.
South Oxfordshire District Council – refuse collection, re-cycling waste, planning policy and enforcement, street cleaning etc.
Oxfordshire County Council – education, highways, street lighting, Green Belt and structure planning with SEERA etc.
Environmental conservation – the Green Belt, Shotover, village gardens, village open spaces, country footpaths, orchards, RoW etc.
Wildlife & Biodiversity – local volunteer conservation groups, Wildlife Conservation Area, tree planting, pond creation etc.
Local History – Horspath has plenty of it, enthusiastically collected by just a few people. Should we have a local history club? etc.
Energy Conservation & Sustainability – everyone knows about solar heating, windmills etc., but how to get it installed cheaply? etc.
Tourism – Shotover attracts many thousand of visitors each year – if they visited Horspath, they could spend money here! etc.
Website – one Parish Councillor has taken the lead and set up a good website for the Council. Is anything else required? etc.

Please let the Parish Plan Steering Group know what you think is important to attend to, by dropping in your own suggestions into Parish Plan Suggestions Box in the Horspath Village Stores.

The Development of New Sport and Recreation Facilities in Horspath
The ownership of the former Scout Hut, located on the edge of the existing cricket ground, was legally transferred to the Parish Council in June 2006, and the Village Hall charity was then given the task of making the best use of it for the community. The results of the public consultation completed in 2005 by Horspath Village Sports Association (HVSA) indicated that there is currently a need for a second cricket ground to support Horspath Cricket Club’s four very successful teams, and also a need to lay out some football pitches for FA 11-a-side and for schoolchildren, as none of the two men’s nor the ten boys’ teams have any pitches of their own to play on in the village. As the new cricket ground would need to be 140 metres wide to meet the ECB requirements, it cannot be developed by extending the existing ground, and so the most feasible option is to lay out the new ground on the west side of the Village Hall Play Area, taking in the whole of the existing football practice pitch and about 80 metres of the Bowley Field. The plan on the next page, reprinted and updated from the 2006 proposals

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