Why you should vote Green this year

We care deeply about our local communities and their environment. We have a whole roster of issues we plan to tackle, and we could use your help to do it. Listed below are our campaign issues for 2024, and explainations for why we care and what we will do to change them.

Accompanying the text-based summaries of these issues are videos of our own Emsworth councillor Grainne Rason, explaining to us what her plans are for Emsworth if she were to be re-elected this year.

It’s time to go Green!

Our residents feel that it is unsafe to go on our seas because of the sewage; it’s affecting the local economy and it’s caused by the water companies. The solutions are to change the OFWAT rules, to invest in maintenance and regulation, to restore the environmental agency to full strength and to hold the water company bosses to account.

Green councillors will work with our local groups and Clean Harbours Partnership, The Final
Straw Foundation, 3 Harbours Rowing and Riverfly to work together to have a stronger voice.

We have already carried out a traffic survey of the four busy roads in Emsworth. That was over 500 homes. We did this because we know Hampshire Highways won’t listen without evidence. 78% of our respondents said traffic was too fast.

Emsworth is now getting an SID (a speed-indicated device). This will be mobile and moved around our busy roads, but we need longer-term solutions for all of our wards. That means: safer crossings, 20mph zones around the schools and where the residents know it has needed, and ensuring the crossings are properly maintained for safety.

Our public transport is being cut, and we will also be campaigning to have better bus services in places where they are sorely needed.

Havant’s green spaces are being targeted for development because residential developers recognise this is a highly desirable area and that they can sell houses for huge sums. This is unacceptable, and our candidates will campaign to preserve our open green spaces and agricultural land.

We will also work to have retrofitting across the borough because we have some of the most poorly insulated homes in Europe; we have poor energy security, and yet 46% of carbon emissions in Havant are from housing.

Our homes need to have 21st century energy saving.

We will continue to campaign for curbside glass recycling and push for more bins which are more accessible and in more convenient locations. We will especially campaign for communal glass bins where we have assisted living flats.

Havant Borough Council have made some progress on recycling and passed a motion to investigate bins for hard plastics, disposable vapes and food waste. But we need action sooner, especially
on disposable vapes. Vapes are extremely hazardous and contain valuable metals, especially lithium.
They cause fires when they’re not disposed of correctly. We will be working to have more locations for recycling and better publicity so people know where to recycle and why vapes should be recycled.

We will be working with officers and residents to get food waste recycling established as early as possible.

Southern Water and Portsmouth Water plan to use the new reservoir at Havant Thicket to store water from “effluent recycling”. That’s from sewage.

And this is to supply water to the Southampton area and later to Havant when there is a drought.
We are told we are in a water stressed area. Abstraction from the chalk rivers and streams has to stop. However, the scheme Southern Water propose is untested in this country, involves huge amounts of infrastructure and energy, when we are already energy insecure. So, where is this energy going to come from?

Southern Water have so far failed to explain why other, easier and quicker to build schemes
have been shelved. The owners of Southern Water are the same investment bank that once
owned Thames Water. And the Green Party have been challenging this scheme from the time
the thicket plans were first passed by Havant Borough Council.

Havant Borough Council did not see the small print which said the reservoir could be used for
recycled water. We are working with the Environmental Agency and Natural England to ensure they are fully aware of Southern Water’s lack of transparency and of the alternatives which they could and should be considering to protect our chalk streams and rivers sooner and less expensively.

The Green Party are working behind the scenes to help protect the Ems. The change in our weather patterns is causing the Ems to dry out when we have droughts. Portsmouth Water are now acting to protect our chalk streams by looking at ways to reduce abstraction over the next five years.

Rayner Piper, our candidate for Hermitage, has set up a project called Riverfly. He has got funding for equipment and has organized volunteers to sample all five main chalk streams, including the Ems, every month to show how healthy they are.

And he has surprised the Environmental Agency with the quality of his results. And it’s by collecting these results, he is helping to show how water abstraction is affecting the health of the Ems.