Quite a lot has been happening, but being in the middle of a local election campaign, it has been hard to find the time to update this site.  So, better late than never, here are three pieces of recent news:

1  The news that Sainsburys are not interested in the supermarket planned by the council for Elms Field means that it can be said without exaggeration that the wheels have come off the Conservatives’ unpopular £95 million scheme for Wokingham town centre,  The fact that Sainsburys have pulled out appeared to come as a shock to some – but not to those of us who had been following both Sainsburys’ retail strategy and their responses to enquiries from residents about their intentions.

2 The traffic lights at Winnersh crossroads are STILL not functioning properly.  They are on manually set phasing because the work done last October to install intelligent lights ran into technical difficulties, which the council has failed to resolve 6 months on.  NOT GOOD ENOUGH.  For those of you who were wondering, poor manual settings is the reason why the traffic tails back so far in Robin Hood Lane and back towards Wokingham on Reading Road at off peak times.

3 The 62-bed dementia unit proposed for the former Grounds Maintenance Depot at Woodward Close in Winnersh was given the go-ahead at the Planning Committee on 30th April.  Local councillors will be involved in discussions on the Travel Plan for the home.  This should be we manage to avoid shift changes at the home happening at the same time as children are coming to or from the new Wheatfields Primary School, one of the things I mentioned in my comments to the committee.

4 Oh and the Conservatives are very unhappy that the Lib Dems proposed no increase in Council Tax this year.  They are trying to claim our proposal was invalid in some way.  It wasn’t.  We checked it out with council officers before proposing it, and made some modifications to our original ideas, to make sure that it was ok.  It was accepted as a valid amendment.   The Conservatives have even had the brass neck to say that we should have told them what we were doing before we did it!  This from a group of councillors who keep the budget in Wokingham entirely secret until the papers are published the week before the meeting!  This year they let us see the figures just 1 week before the public get to see them.  Big deal.  Most councils prepare their budgets with cross-party scrutiny over months.  Not Wokingham.  It’s all hidden away until the last possible moment.  And the Conservatives have the nerve to criticise us for not telling them we were going to propose an amendment!  What amazing arrogance!

 

 

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