THE BATTLE FOR HAMBLE     

Blain’s Morning Porridge 8th April 2026 – THE BATTLE FOR HAMBLE     I am delighted to announce the launch of a new book – The Battle of Hamble.On April 9th The Battle of Hamble is published by Windshift. It’s a new book by Bill Blain available on Amazon and from local bookstores. It’s a tale of greedy corporates, bad planning, economic illiteracy, and plucky Hampshire villagers fighting back. The pretty and picturesque village of Hamble-le-Rice is the UK’s leading Sailing centre. It hosts multiple yacht clubs, marine businesses, pubs and is a tourist destination. The Battle of Hamble lays out how the prosperous village on the Solent Coast of Hampshire is about to be decimated, its economy destroyed, and its people made destitute by the rapacious actions of two greedy corporates; UK Homebuilder Persimmon, and Mexican cement and waste multinational CEMEX.Persimmon has been repeatedly refused planning permission to build homes on an old airfield because the local road and infrastructure is overwhelmed. They’ve licensed CEMEX to dig a gravel quarry in the heart of the village, right next to three schools and over 1000 homes. The quarry is wholly unnecessary. It will create devastating impacts across the local economy, putting 6000 local jobs at risk, make road congestion even worse, while raising noise, nuisance, dust and particulate health risks. It is already hitting the wealth and prosperity of the village as home prices tumble and businesses plan to move out. Over 20,000 residents on the Hamble peninsula will be affected adversely. It’s social injustice on an enormous scale. At no point in the planning process were the economics of putting the local economy at risk properly examined. Locals and experts demonstrated how the Developers’ plans to “mitigate” the flooding, pollution and congestion risks of the quarry were deeply flawed and based on misinterpreted data. Yet the planning inspector assigned to hear the case didn’t even mention these in his decision to approve the quarry. Big money won – the small people lost. The book examines how and why the UK planning system has become so deeply flawed. It explains how Broken Britain is the consequence of bureaucratic processes that fail to deliver Government objectives of strong and resilient communities – and in fact delivers exactly the opposite.The books delves into how UK homebuilders act as landbanks with little incentive to build homes except when it suits their profits to do so, how gravel is anything but a strategic resource as recycled materials are now more important, and how the real value of a gravel quarry is not what is dug out of it, but what is subsequently stuffed back into it – which is likely to be landfill waste or worse. The developers won by arbitraging the planning system, using obsolete rules that define gravel as a "strategic resource” to trump the rights of the locals. Over 5700 local objections were made to the quarry, and 40 separate grounds for rejection were identified. Despite the health, wealth and prosperity risks, the planning bureaucracy determined a wholly unnecessary gravel quarry is more important than a resilient and vibrant local community! The developers won because they played their knowledge on how the underfunded and under-resourced UK planning system has been captured by expensive consultants and lawyers – who add complexity and make it prohibitively expensive for planning victims to fight. The Hamble quarry is staggering corporate injustice perpetrated on the people of Hamble. The boards of Persimmon and CEMEX will likely pocket bigger bonuses, while the village will die. The Battle For Hamble illustrates how Broken Britain is exploited by corporate greed, riven by inefficient bureaucracy which doesn’t understand basic economics, all of which make social outcomes worse. ContactBill Blain+[email protected]