Cllr Stephen Conway
The borough council is seeking to reduce the new housing quota imposed on the borough by the government, which all parties on the council believe is unsustainably large.
You will probably have read of the council’s recent lobbying of MPs and government ministers to put the case for a lower number. Without a reduction in the allocation, we are fearful that valuable countryside will be lost and our already creaking infrastructure – with clogged roads and oversubscribed schools – simply will not cope.
But if we are all agreed that the number of new dwellings that Wokingham borough is expected to approve through the planning process is too great, we are also concerned that we need the right kind of new homes to meet local demand.
We live in an area of high property prices.
Many families and individuals in our community simply cannot afford market-priced housing.
Housing needs assessments undertaken by the council to suggest that up to half of the need in the borough is for less-expensive accommodation.
How can we help those who are priced out of the market? Over the last decades building more homes for sale on the open market has not reduced prices and increased affordability, so what can we do?
We need to make sure that a significant proportion of the new houses built are affordable with a capital A (that is, are delivered at below-market prices in discounted or shared-ownership schemes) or are Social-Rented properties (offered for below-market rents by the council itself or its partners in housing companies and housing associations).
The existing local plan for development in the borough has a requirement that 35% of all new housing should be in the Affordable or Social-Rental categories. We are now looking at increasing this proportion in the emerging local plan.
Exactly what figure we are able to include in the final version of the new local plan will not depend simply on our preferences; we will have to convince the local plan inspector, appointed by government to consider the suitability of the final version of the local plan, that any percentage higher than 35% is viable.
The viability test will take into account all the other contributions we expect developers to make to mitigate the impact of new housing – such as new highways works, extra school capacity, and environmental improvement measures.
We are also working on inventive solutions to expand our Social-Rented stock outside the local plan process, including building ourselves (with new temporary accommodation units soon coming on stream at Grovelands in Winnersh and a major development to refurbish and expand our stock taking place at Gorse Ride, Finchampstead) and increasing our cooperation with the private rented sector to secure long-term leases on favourable terms.
Wokingham borough, then, faces two housing challenges, not one.
The first – the threat of unsustainably large housing development – is perhaps uppermost in the minds of most residents.
But the second – a critical shortage of truly affordable accommodation for members of our community priced out of the market – needs to be addressed with equal vigour and determination.
Cllr Stephen Conway is the Executive Member for Affordable and Social Housing and Deputy Leader of Wokingham Borough Council, and ward member for Twyford
