A plan for 4,000 homes sandwiched between Shinfield and Arborfield will be on the top of everyone’s mind as planning inspectors return to Wokingham next week.
The last time Wokingham’s local plan was updated, houses close to the town centre south of the railway line, were important.
Now it’s the homes set to be built in the Loddon Valley Garden village, closer to Reading, and how those houses will be accessed that is getting everyone hot under the collar.
Wokingham’s opposition leader, Pauline Jorgensen is sounding the alarm about about the borough’s ‘local plan’, calling it ‘deeply flawed’.
New hearings with planning inspectors will begin on Tuesday, March 17 at 10am and the inspectors look set to approve the model for how Wokingham grows over the next few years.
Cllr Jorgensen agrees with parts of the plan such as the protection of the Green Belt but she says that what is being proposed in Shinfield and Arborfield and the development of Hall Farm is ‘deeply flawed’.
Council leader Stephen Conway says that planned development is better than development anarchy and that the professional inspectors wouldn’t move on to stage two of their inspection unless they were confident the plan was sound.
He said: “I find Pauline’s opposition to the plan curious. It’s based on a draft drawn up by her party when it ran the council.
“She was in the executive that approved the draft, which included all the major development sites included in the current version – including Hall Farm.
“For her first year or so in opposition, she was calling on the new administration to get on with processing with the plan we had inherited from the Conservatives.
“She changed her tune only in the months preceding the 2024 elections. She was right first time round.”
Cllr Jorgensen said: “When the Plan was debated in September 2024, there were parts local Conservatives agreed with, such as protection of the Green Belt.
“However, we had concerns about almost 4,000 houses at Hall Farm.
“One of the main accesses to the Hall Farm site is via a single-lane bridge over the M4 to Lower Earley Way, joining at the Meldreth Way roundabout.
“This will cause a significant increase in traffic on this road, which as everyone knows is often gridlocked at peak times, and will particularly affect my residents in Hillside, as well as people currently living in Hawkedon, Shinfield and Winnersh.
“I am worried inadequate provision has been made to cope with this.
“Lower Earley Way is already badly congested, the Showcase roundabout floods, and it is also a contingency route for the M4 traffic.”
Cllr Stephen Conway said: “The plan is the best we can do to accommodate the housing numbers we are given by the government.
“Besides allocating housing sites, it determines our local policies on affordable housing, energy efficient new homes, more than 100 new protected green spaces, and 13 areas of valued landscape character, where development can be controlled.
“It’s the best we are going to get and without a plan developers can build wherever they like with limited ability on our part to stop them.
“Planned development is better than development anarchy.”
