Hands off hall, church warned

The council members are concerned that plans to redevelop the St Ninian's United Reformed Church next door to the village hall could see some poaching of groups take place.

It is believed the church authorities want to change the use of their site on Pagham Road into a mixture of a new hall with flats above. This would support the retention of the church, built in the 1960s, amid shrinking congregations.

No formal planning application for the scheme has yet been submitted by the church authorities but they asked Pagham Parish Council for its informal views about the proposals.

The councillors met last week (JUL 2) to consider the request. They have postponed their plans for an extension to the village hall to allow the church's new facilities to capture the market.

But they told the church's minister, the Rev John Gordon, in a letter from parish clerk Chris Braby: 'We are concerned that you describe it as a '˜creche', since we already host a successful pre-school, which provides a significant portion of our revenue stream.

'We would welcome assurances that you would not actively encourage any of our existing regular clients to transfer.

'At the same time, we hope that for one-off events and future regular users our individual booking secretaries will be able to co-operate rather than compete.'

The parish council built the village hall nine years ago but handed day to day running to independent trustees. It is regularly fully booked for activities such as sports and dancing as well as private functions.

The councillors said they saw no possibility of combining the hall and church sites to form one big community area. However, they were willing to allow some overflow car parking if the need arose because of a specific function in the church hall.

'We wish to keep intact the boundary hedge on the north side of our site,' Mr Braby said, 'but we would be prepared to install a lockable gate towards the west side of this boundary, furthest from the road, to allow for non-commercial vehicle access between the two.

'We could then allow you to use this gate to access part of the village hall car park for overflow purposes on particular occasions, given reasonable notice and provided that there was no clash with our own requirements.'

Mr Braby stated that the parish council would appreciate a reciprocal arrangement. If that was not possible, however, a contribution towards the surfacing and marking out of the village hall car park could be sought.

He added that parish councillors would be duty bound to reflect any concerns of residents about the proposals when the time came to formally comment on any planning application for the redevelopment.

The village hall trustees have yet to publically state their response to the church proposals.