Drawing up a new local plan – the set of documents by which the borough council seeks to deliver the housing target imposed by the government, and also establish new local planning policies – is a protracted and highly complex process.
Wokingham’s new local plan began to be put together under the previous Conservative administration.
To meet the government’s housing target, the council first invited landowners and developers to propose sites for development.
Council planning officers then assessed each proposed site on purely planning grounds, eliminating those that conflicted with existing national or local planning policies.
The remaining sites were then subject to further assessment to decide which should be included in the draft local plan.
In Wokingham’s case, we have had two draft local plans, both drawn up under the previous Conservative administration.
The first included a major new settlement at Grazeley, in the south of the borough, but that had to be abandoned when the Ministry of Defence objected to Grazeley’s inclusion after the nuclear exclusion zone around Burghfield was extended.
The second draft substituted Hall Farm for Grazeley. It was subject to public consultation early in 2022 and the new administration at Wokingham Borough Council took over that May while the consultation responses were being assessed by planning officers.
The new administration decided to reassess the draft it had inherited. We looked again at Hall Farm and two other sites which had been proposed by developers as alternatives. We visited all three sites and asked each of the promoters detailed and probing questions about their proposals.
We also sought advice from a planning barrister on the status of the draft and how much leeway we had to alter it.
In essence, our room for manoeuvre was very limited. Once a site is in the draft, there is a presumption in favour of it appearing in the final local plan. It has been identified by planning professionals as suitable for development and unless circumstances materially change (as they did with Grazeley), any attempt to withdraw a site is likely to be successfully challenged by the developers at the inspector’s enquiry. The enquiry is the final and vital stage of the process, at which the government-appointed inspector decides whether the plan is sound enough to be approved.
The draft, in short, is the point at which key decisions are made which cannot – except in the most unusual circumstances – be unmade.
But if we have little scope to do anything about the sites identified in the draft plan we inherited, we can do things to make local planning policies better, and this is what we have been focusing on for the last year and a half.
Next week, I shall return to the local plan and give you a flavour of the policy improvements that we hope to secure – on energy efficiency standards for new homes, designation of new Green Spaces, areas of public landscape value, and affordable housing.
By Stephen Conway
