EVERY resident in the borough is being urged to let the Government know what they think about its failure to listen over housing numbers.
The leader of the council, Cllr Julian McGhee-Sumner, has promised that after the local elections he will launch a new consultation over the issue.
He told a meeting of Wokingham Borough Council on Thursday, March 21, that he had wanted to hold a referendum but he said this would have been illegal. Instead, he said: “We are having to fall back on a special consultation.
“I know many residents will comment that we ignore consultation responses, but this is very different.
“We will pose a question in that consultation asking if you support the government inflicted housing numbers in a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ manner.
“We want as many residents to respond so we can go back to government to say to them, ‘Look, all these residents cannot be wrong, you have to do something about these overly high housing numbers’.
“The more responses we get the stronger the argument.”
Cllr McGhee-Sumner reminded councillors that applications to build more than 10,000 homes had been approved. “That is equivalent to 11.2 years of land supply based on the Government’s required rate of build of 854 houses per year.”
He added: “Over the last few months feedback from residents on future development has been deafening through petitions, motions and responses to the ‘Local Plan Update’ sessions around the Borough. It is clear that residents are saying ‘enough is enough’ a view that we totally agree with and have been putting it forward to Government for many years, but they are not listening.”
And Cllr McGhee-Sumner wanted every resident to respond to show the strength of feeling. He hoped that councillors from all parties would get behind the initiative.
“I can assure you every mechanism will be engaged to get the maximum return on that consultation,” he promised.
“Imagine a consultation that had 25,000 responses or even 50,000 responses agreeing with us that the housing numbers are too large. The power of that strength of feeling must help us in our ambition to get the numbers reduced by the Government.”
He concluded: “I cannot guarantee we will be successful, but we will try with all our strength to get the government to listen and change the numbers.”
There was applause from the chamber as he sat down.
Liberal Democrat leader Cllr Linsday Ferris was also applauded after his speech, in which he said the actions of some developers had been “disgraceful”.
