A village is fighting a huge battle to stop possibly five thousand new homes being built on its green fields.
Banners have been erected, urging residents to Save our village by joining the fight. Hundreds of leaflets have been delivered to homes.
The government has said Wokingham borough should build 1,600 new homes a year for around 15 years. That’s more than double the previous figure of around 700. The aim is for 300,000 new homes a year in the UK.
Hurst villagers fear thousands of the new homes could end up on their rural parish which acts as a large green lung of fields in the middle of the borough.
They’ve been pouring emails onto their MP Theresa May, complaining about the new proposed 1,630 target figure, ahead of the deadline for responses, which is October 1.
Last week (September 23) Hurst Village Society held a virtual, online meeting for residents to update them on the campaign.
Society chair Wayne Smith, who is also Wokingham borough’s Hurst councillor, told them: “Hurst people have been lobbying and writing to Theresa May. There have been a lot of contacts from the village.”
He urged everyone who hadn’t already written to Mrs May about the proposed 1,630 new homes a year to do so by Thursday, October 1.
Speaking as chair and not as parish councillor, Mr Smith said Hurst, Wokingham borough’s largest parish covering two-and-a-half square miles, was particularly at risk.
Wokingham, Shinfield, Arborfield and Barkham had already taken quite a lot of housing. Wargrave, Ruscombe and Remenham were mostly protected because much of their land is designated as green belt. Hurst was left vulnerable.
In the village society’s letter to Mrs May, Mr Smith and society president Annette Drake said that the large Grazeley Garden Village building scheme was now unlikely to happen.
There was no doubt that one of the areas Wokingham Borough Council would seriously consider to help make up for that loss was Hurst. This could be for a minimum of 250 homes, but to fulfil the government’s demands for homes about 5,000 was more likely.
They challenged the method used to work out the 1,630 figure, saying that if the method was approved “Hurst will be vulnerable to losing a substantial area of countryside to housing.”
This would harm Hurst parish and also residents of Woodley, Wokingham and Bracknell who saw Hurst as a “green gap between settlements and somewhere to visit and enjoy the views and countryside.”
If the area was lost to development “Hurst will end up as yet another vast housing estate merging with the neighbouring urban towns,” they added.
They said Wokingham had dutifully built 10,000 homes in the last 15 years, but that was at a great cost to the community. Roads were choked with traffic, doctors’ surgeries couldn’t cope with appointments unless they were three or four weeks in advance and stations had insufficient parking.
“The health and social wellbeing of the community you represent is already suffering and will suffer further should this unreasonable increase in new housing take place,” they told Mrs May.
They asked her to challenge Housing Secretary Robert Jenrick over how the target figure was worked out, so the calculating method was changed or dismissed.
A response from Mrs May will be published in Thursday’s print edition of Wokingham.Today.
Theresa May can be contacted at theresa.may.mp@parliament.uk
Wayne Smith also asked residents to sign a petition against the proposals at https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/548391
