Planning Matters #9 of 2025 

31 August 2025 

In this edition: 

•    New ‘Grey Belt’ application in Normandy
•    Planning Seminars 5 and 12 September - reminder
•    Request for donations to cover admin costs
•    Please complete our short survey

New 'Grey Belt' application in Normandy
As if the by now well known Taylor Wimpey proposal was not enough, a further application in Normandy, seeking to exploit the newly-defined category of ‘Grey Belt’, has recently appeared. Gleeson Land have announced their intention to develop the site known as Shortlands Farm, to the west of Wyke Lane off the A323 on the way to Ash, where they hope to build 200 houses. Further details can be seen on the developer’s website here, and Guildford Borough Council have already accepted the developer’s argument that an Environmental Impact Assessment will not be necessary for this site. 

Leaving aside the merits and demerits of this particular site, it amounts to yet another developer-led move to fill in the green spaces between the ever-expanding Aldershot/Tongham/Ash conurbation and the town of Guildford, already scheduled to expand to the west. In that sense it cannot be seen in isolation from the Taylor Wimpey (TW) proposal - and no doubt there will be others as well. We must hope that GBC will be able to insist on all these sites being seen in the round, as part of its ongoing process to update the Local Plan, rather than allowing them to be picked off one by one. 

And Normandy needs to be recognised as an important buffer zone, preventing those conurbations from merging. This will be crucial as we get closer to the TW planning application.

Planning Seminars 5 and 12 September - reminder
Places are still available for our informal planning seminars at 8pm in the Village Hall on 5 and 12 September. At these we shall try to explain the basis on which planning decisions are taken, in the context of the major new developments planned for Normandy. Please come along! You can register using the buttons below.

Request for donations to cover admin costs
In the past, NAG collected modest subscriptions from its followers to cover its admin costs, particularly the printing of newsletters, but since we moved to an online model several years back we have maintained our website and email platforms with the welcome help of small grants from Normandy Parish Council and Surrey County Council (thank you!) Now, faced with the challenge of responding to the proposed major new development(s) in Normandy, we have started to incur significant additional costs; so far these have been for printing posters and flyers, and for moving to a paid-for version of MailChimp to accommodate our growing mailing list.

We are thus seeking voluntary contributions to allow us to cover these expenses. For now, donations need not be big: £5 or £10 from everyone on our list would be more than enough (if we needed more later for something bigger we would come back to you then). We have created a couple of platforms to allow you to make donations online securely and easily, as follows:
•    If you have a PayPal account or are happy to give your card details - we prefer you to use PayPal. The charge is at the charity rate of 1.4% of value donated plus 20p per transaction, so 34p on a £10 donation. 
•    If you want to pay by Apple Pay (i.e. have an iPhone,don’t have a PayPal account and don’t want to load your card details) we have a Crowdfunder site. This site defaults to giving a ‘tip’ which you can set to zero by clicking ‘Enter Custom Amount’. A fee of 2.4% on value donated plus 20p per transaction is charged, so 44p per £10 donation.
•    We can also accept cheques, or if you would prefer to make a direct donation, please email us at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. so we can let you have bank details.Thanks in advance for your support.

Please complete our short survey
As we state on our website, “we are a local village association run by residents who care about our community and who wish to protect its special character and its amenities.” We see our role at NAG as being to help you understand the planning system better, and to make informed decisions of your own about individual planning applications. Occasionally, something comes along that we believe will have a major detrimental impact on our village, and where we believe we are duty bound to speak out against it. 

Such is the case with the proposed Taylor Wimpey proposal for hundreds of houses in Normandy, which we believe will fundamentally change the nature of our community. However, rather than assume that everyone shares our view, we would ask you to take a very short survey that will give us a better idea of the degree of support or otherwise for the proposal, and the key issues one way or another. Conscious that we are still in the holiday period, we shall keep it open until the flow of responses dries up; we shall then publish the results on our website and in a future newsletter. Please click on the button below to complete the survey; it will take no more than five minutes.