Blain’s Morning Porridge 8^th April 2026 – THE BATTLE FOR HAMBLE    

Dear Morning Porridge Reader

I am delighted to announce the launch of a new book – The Battle of Hamble. It’s an in-depth look at the Hamble Gravel Quarry, an example of everything that is wrong with Broken Britain’s inept planning process, bureaucracy, and how greedy corporates arbitrage the system to their own ends. I’ve written about the quarry many times in the Morning Porridge.

You can order it on-line from Amazon – The Battle For Hamble

LINK TO PODCAST

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 that’s been enabled by the Broken Britain’s feckless and unfit for purpose bureaucracy, bad planning decisions, and failing local democracy.

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.

Despite the locals providing expert testimony and information to the planning inspectorate inquiry into the quarry – these were all ignored and discounted.

• The residents showed CEMEX had used weather information from Southampton Airport – which is over 10 miles away and inland, presenting a very different and much milder wind patterns than Hamble experiences. This is critical for understanding where the dust raised by the quarry is likely to fall.
• The residents used data science to demonstrate how CEMEX completely misunderstood that an apparent drop in the number of vehicles on the heavily congested B-Road into Hamble was not due to lower numbers, but rising congestion because more cars were taking much longer! If speed on a road slows, fewer cars will pass a given spot over time!
• The residents showed that Hamble’s air-quality is already poor because of shipping movements on Southampton Water and the Solent – a factor CEMEX failed to note in its mitigations. They also showed medical advice from the UK’s leading medical expert on particulates strong suggesting it would be dangerous to put a quarry right next to the schools – that advice was ignored by the inspector.

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.

Contact

Bill Blain

+447770881033

Billblain@Windshift.capital

Note for editors: Bill Blain is a leading financier and expert on bond and private capital markets. He is a regular market commentator and publishes “Blain’s Morning Porridge”, a well read market commentary. Bill is a member of the Society of Professional Economists and Honorary Professor at the Edinburgh Business School where he lectures on the post-grad investment management course. In his spare time, he is a passionate sailor, living in the village of Hamble on England’s South Coast.