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By April 2007 every house within the main Marcham village envelope had been asked to tale a copy of our simple questionnaire. This asked everyone in the household about the Anson Trust's proposals for the Anson Field. In total 590 households received the questionnaire, 66% of the households returned them, amounting to 802 individual responses.
The survey responses are summarised in the figure above. Despite the prospect of improved leisure facilities, a new community centre and possibly a relocated and improved Primary School the results show overwhelmingly that the village is against the proposals.
The Neighbours Around the Field (NAF) committee organised the questionnaire with the aid of additional concerned residents. Originally we had proposed to the Anson Trust and to the Parish Council that a survey of Marcham should be undertaken to get a fully representative viewpoint of the whole village and offered our assistance as we felt a joint survey would best guarantee an unbiased result. Neither The Anson Trust nor the Parish Council were interested in carrying out such a survey.
Eventually we took the decision to organise a survey using our own resources. As we were the only group involved in the organisation we took particular care to ensure this survey is a true and unbiased representation of the views of our village. The survey form stressed that the Trust were planning to provide new upgraded facilities to replace those on the Anson Field. You can download a copy of the form here; it even provides a link to the Anson Trust web site while not mentioning the NAF web site because it already contained the results of our previous survey (limited to the properties adjoining the field). Our volunteer distributors were carefully briefed. They were told that if they were asked for an opinion then they were to explain that they did not wish to give one for fear of compromising the questionnaire results.
We took the decision not to make the questionnaire anonymous; this eliminated any risk of duplication of "votes" and allowed us to check back with any household if a form had not been completed in a clear way. It also means that should any group wish to call into question the validity of the survey results then all the forms can be made available for confidential review by a suitable qualified independent inspector. In addition, as addresses are recorded on the forms we can continue to accept more from addresses that have not yet managed to return them. Few objected to the non-confidential nature of the survey although it must be remarked that (perhaps understandably) many Parish Councillors declined to give their views or those of their families.
The area we covered in the survey extends westwards to include Church Street, southwards to include Mill Road and Marcham Mill, northwards to include Kings Avenue and eastwards to include Hyde Farm and Anson Close. We did not re-survey the houses adjoining the field as these householders had already responded to our December survey and these earlier results are included in the totals presented here.
We hope the results now give clear guidance to the Parish Council about how they should treat the anticipated planning application when they are invited to comment by the VOWH planning committee.
Naturally we hoped the Anson Trust will take careful note of the results too and revise their strategy to align it with the wishes of the village. Unfortunately the evidence so far is that they seem surprisingly uninterested in the views of the village and are convinced that they know what is best for us all!
We have done our best to drop a questionnaire in to every property in the village and then to collect them from you. We have however excluded those houses around the field as these were covered in our December survey. The earlier results have been combined with the more recent survey to create the figures above. If we have missed you in both surveys please accept our apologies and contact us as described on this page.
You can also download the results as a PDF document here
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