Local Green Space for Winnersh
Liberal Democrat Councillor for Winnersh ward Learn more
by Prue Bray on 25 March, 2009
The council is in the process of putting its plans in place for where houses will be built between now and 2026. This is called the ‘core strategy’. The draft core strategy is currently being examined by a Planning Inspector at a series of hearings in Wokingham, to see if it will do what it says on the tin. The plan rests on building most of the houses in large lumps – 3,500 at Arborfield Garrison when the army moves out, 2,500 around Spencers Wood / Shinfield /Three Mile Cross, 2,500 to the south of Wokingham town, and 1,500 in Emmbrook. Even with those so-called Strategic Development Locations, hundreds of houses will still need to be built in other places.
Lib Dem councillors voted against the plan when the Conservatives presented it to the council. Our main concerns are that the Arborfield site does not have enough houses – there is scope to build a sustainable new settlement there on old Ministry of Defence land – and that Emmbrook has too many houses – we don’t believe that the roads can take the traffic and there is a lot of doubt about what new transport measures could be put in place.
Because we objected I ‘appeared’ (technical term for being allowed to participate in the discussion) at some of the sessions of the examination last week and this week, along with some of the residents associations, who really did well, speaking for local people. The main participants are the council and the developers who want to build the houses.
I tried to put all the points that I could, from schools to flooding, cemeteries and allotments, and lots of other things. We’ll see whether it has had any effect when the Inspector makes his report in the summer.
The hearings are continuing for the next few weeks, to cover some of the outstanding issues, like strategic infrastructure.
2 Comments
[…] One final bit of development related material in the paper is on the letters page, with a letter from Arborfield Councillor Gary Cowan, expressing his disappointment with the cancellation of the Community Forum, and also stating his position with regards to the routing of the Arborfield Relief Road. You can of course tell that we have an election coming in Arborfield next year as there is a whole paragraph blaming the previous Labour government for the houses here – whilst that is entirely true, what is forgotten is that following the defeat of the Labour government at the last general election those housing targets were abolished, and Wokingham Borough Council like many others took the opportunity to review the housing numbers. Whilst some councils cut the numbers, the Conservative controlled council chose to retain the previous figures. In the interests of balance at this point I’ll also say that the Liberal Democrats also want to build houses on the Garrison site, and have previously stated that they thought there should be more than 3,500 here. […]
The Lib Dems did think there should be more than 3500 houses in Arborfield. We thought 5000. Gary Cowan persists in claiming we wanted the entire housing allocation put there, which is just nonsense. But it distracts people from remembering he is the one who was in charge of the Core Strategy. Which put the housing in Arborfield, something he would like people to forget.
Why did we want 5000? For 2 reasons:
1 3500 was unlikely to generate enough developer contributions to provide the money for decent infrastructure e.g. the schools and the roads. I think we are in the process of being proved right on that.
2 We were opposed to the North Wokingham SDL, because we didn’t think it would work, one prime reason being the road problems are even worse there than in Arborfield. And that meant 1500 houses would have to be allocated somewhere else, with Arborfield being our least worst option. And with regard to the North Wokingham distributor road, we are being proved right on that too.