Comment: Wokingham’s local plan? The cunning, plan ahead!

In the Wokingham Paper of November 17, we printed a special commentary by Tony Johnson about the future of the borough and the local plan. There was more! Here is Tony’s full, uncut article complete with links, add-ons and more information.

Make sure you have your say and leave your thoughts at the bottom of the article

Resistance is Pointless? – No!

Not quite the Vogons’ battle cry when they destroyed planet Earth to make way for a intergalactic construction project, but close.

If you believe development is inevitable, you’d be forgiven for thinking that you’ve neither choice nor voice in the matter of construction projects around the Borough.

But you’d be wrong.

So we’ve included a handy jargon buster to help you understand Vogons, as well as ‘the plan’.

Wokingham’s May Fayre was really cool! (and a great community event)

Changes to speed limits on major roads in Wokingham and Winnersh approved

No, that’s not a ‘cunning plan’, (no turnips here). it’s the Local Plan, currently undergoing a mid-term review and the reason it’s important is that you’ve a chance to influence that review.

Simple Choices – Hard Decisions

Make no mistake, this is about population growth, from reproduction as well as migration and there are some tricky questions to consider.

On housing, should the new houses be spread evenly across the Borough or lumped together on one or two sites?

On services, be it care homes, childcare, dentists, doctors, hospitals or schools, should they be built into the borough or sourced from outside?

On Shops, Offices & Industrial areas, where should they be located and how much do we want (or need)?

On green spaces and leisure activities, can we afford to keep and sustain them, or are they simply places that some future Local Plan will have to gobble up?

On infrastructure, be it travel (by road or rail); water (wanted or not); or utilities; what should we be doing so that we can enjoy our lives without being jammed or deafened, flooded or powerless?

So what’s WBC doing?

Grazeley - a secret plan to build a 15,000 home garden village was revealed last month — Grazeley – a secret plan to build a 15,000 home garden village was revealed last month

Wokingham Borough Council’s recent ‘Call for Sites’, along with an ‘Expression of Interest’ for a new village in Grazeley have triggered criticism and much wailing and gnashing of teeth.

The map shows where approximately 250 suggested places for possible development are located, resulting from the ‘Call for Sites’. Of these, 85% are for housing and site sizes vary; from a dozen small plots each with space for just one new house; to three huge areas, each capable of taking six to seven thousand.

At the moment, all the sites are coloured orange, so one can’t easily tell which ones are for Leisure; Industrial; Retail; or mixed development.

Also for now – nothing has been decided and it certainly isn’t the case that every one of the sites on the map will get developed, creating Chokingham into the bargain.

Problems, like the population, have grown

Back in the 1960’s, despite howls of protest at the time, the one way system was introduced into Wokingham’s town centre because it was jammed solid. By the early 70’s there was a plan to introduce an Inner Distributor Ring road – the IDR. Luckily, it never went ahead.

There were a few industrial buildings along Molly Millars Lane. They’ve grown & grown into a whopping great industrial estate – right in the middle of the town. Access is “problematic” as huge trucks have to use a mix of residential streets or the town centre to get there and residents have to put up with the consequences.

Currently, there’s a plan which calls for over £19M to be spent making access easier by building a road and a new railway bridge and removing the car dealership from the junction of Molly Millars Lane and the Finchampstead Road.

Meanwhile in the town, Retail in Wokingham’s town centre has been “challenging” for at least five decades. Despite the difficulties of lack of parking; high rents and rates; a move to out of town retail parks; the internet’s influence on buying habits; the Borough Council has bravely embarked on a £100M Regeneration project to rectify things.

Whether or not you agree with the decisions, credit where it’s due – the current administration is trying to fix the historic problems.

Learning the game

Computer gamers may recall SimCity, an open ended city-building computer game launched in 1989, which allowed the player to found and develop a city from a greenfield start.

Along the way, the player learnt how to balance residential, commercial, retail, & industrial development with infrastructure and utilities to provide a varied and attractive environment where citizens have work rest and leisure, and you as city planner get the job done at the same time as keeping a balanced budget.

Challenging? – yes to the point of captivation – over 35 million players.

Easy? That’s a different matter entirely.

Realistic? Good for basic understanding, but reality’s even more complex.

The Shape of Things to Come

Wokingham local plan — The Borough Council’s Call To Sites map shows potential areas for future development. These are NOT final sites, just an expression of interest

Despite anything you’ve read to the contrary, at this stage in the process Borough Councillors don’t have the new Local Plan for housing & other developments.

However, they do have a project plan with a timetable, published in September 2015 as the ‘Local Development Scheme’ which describes the key stages to create a Local Plan.

Work on this continues and WBC are currently asking Parish & Town councils for local knowledge to help form an overall assessment of the ~250 possible sites. This consultation runs until mid December.

When the local knowledge is in, an assessment as to the Sustainability of the sites can be made and a “long list” of all the (un!) reasonable options will be published for public comment in 2017, so that a “short list of the preferred options can be published a bit later.

To understand the scale of the challenge, as well as to get your creative thinking going, here’s some ideas as to what should (or shouldn’t depending on your point of view) be used as options for the Local Plan :

The “Thin End – Long Wedge” option

This option is to make a ‘democratic’ spread of houses among the 150 to 200 sites capable of taking them.

Limiting the maximum number of houses on any one site to 200, 100, 50, 20 or 10 (proportional to the size of the site) gives a total of around 12,000 to 16,000 new houses.

However, there’s a couple of headaches that immediately arise.

Locally we average over 2 cars per house, so all the Borough’s key roads would get jammed and by spreading the money so thinly, we won’t be able to afford all the road improvements needed.

Similarly, new residents will need more primary & secondary school places than we’ve got, but because they’re all spread out, there isn’t enough dosh to build schools for every site.

It’s democratic in that it spreads the pain of new houses equally, but plain dumb because it causes the maximum inconvenience to everyone – new and existing residents alike.

Democratic intent, “Dumbocratic” result.

The “Lump Hammer” option

At the other end of the spectrum, one picks one location to develop a new town of twelve to fifteen thousand houses.

For everyone who doesn’t already live on or near that site, this is great!

Unless it affects you on the way to work, or you live there already, then it’s ghastly!

It solves the “spreading money too thinly” problem, giving enough to build or upgrade roads, plus some brand new schools. Affordable housing aplenty. Shops, doctors, and so on.

Except that the developer contributions don’t actually pay for everything that’s needed.

Even if the developer contributions to WBC are alleged to be the “second highest in the country” (hah!), they don’t pay for all the infrastructure that a new town needs.

Guess who pays?

Central government? – perhaps, but that’s a “big ask”.

Local government? – difficult, we’re already £19M off the pace.

You get the idea – it’s the taxpayer who pays and the developers & new home owners who benefit.

As this is a family paper, let’s call this answer “Unicratic”.

Between these two extremes, there’s hundreds of options and it’s unlikely that one answer will please everyone. So, with this in mind, here’s the third option as to how we might move forwards.

The “Fork Handles” option

Trying to apply 21st century planning to an historic town or village is much like putting lipstick on a pig. The end results aren’t pretty and the pig doesn’t like it.

So, instead of the Wedge or Hammer option, perhaps a four pronged approach might share the gains as well as the pains :

Expand the capacity of chosen main traffic routes with graded developments alongside, allowing room for future expansion.
Plan the graded developments. Feeder roads go next to the main traffic routes; then heavy industrial & large retail; then light industrial, storage & research; then a linear park, shops, doctors & dentists; lower cost residential, lastly medium to high cost residential served by arterial as well as capillary travel routes.
Design the infrastructure that support & service the communities one wants to build.
Move the Molly Millars Industrial estate to alongside a main traffic route. Replace with a mix of residential and retail / indoor leisure (“no-cost-to-park” to attract business).

There are very few places in the Borough where this can be made to work. North of the A329M; A33 south of the M4; M4 junction 9 (not 8/9).

The sharing might be labelled “Partocratic”, so expect factions ahead.

So what do YOU want?

Having a Local Plan gives us the benefit of some local choices as to how many houses of which type go in where, also that the relevant infrastructure can go in the right place at the right time.

In the absence of a Local Plan, Developers have an almost free rein to do what they like. This will be worse than today’s situation.

The Local Plan is probably the most important and emotive topic that we face, short of natural or inflicted disasters. It needs to be sustainable into the generations to come. The options above may be anywhere from great to awful, passing daft along the way.

Our Councillors, be they Parish / Town or Borough are elected to represent our views, but in order to do this, they need to know what those views are.

Your opinion matters – now would be a good time to make contact.

And finally…

If you don’t believe that development is inevitable, then you’ll need to consider how you’re going to hold the tide back OR get some changes made to Government policy, e.g. legislation to apply an “infrastructure first” approach for all development.

You’ll also be able to advise locals about the challenge of dualling or duelling the A33.

One needs a civil engineer.

The other needs a miracle.

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Vogons – Very ordinary guide on new settlements

This jargon busting guide is to help guide you through the main topics that form the rules of our planning system today.

Main items are Hyperlinked so that if you want to know more about something, just click it to get the detail. In general, links are as follows:

Acronyms: Wikipedia entry

Document Titles: Main Web page

xx pages pdf: Separate link to the pdf (where available).

When you look at the web page, you’ll see that there are lots of additional documents, the ones below are just the main ones as an introduction.