By Cllr Clive Jones
After many attempts at persuading the Government to adopt a more common sense approach on housing numbers, both in Wokingham Borough and on a national scale, I’m pleased to see signs that our message may finally have been heard.
In December, the Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities began consulting on changes to national planning policy which we think could significantly help us and other affected councils to reduce the number of new homes being imposed.
This consultation, which follows our representations to various Secretaries of State including Michael Gove MP, ends on Thursday, March 2, and it’s vital that you submit your comments before then.
So why does this matter to you?
Like all local planning authorities, we have to calculate our future housing need using a standard mathematical formula set by the Government.
If we take more homes than we need in a given year, we can’t offset this by taking fewer in future.
Since 2006, Wokingham Borough has taken a total of 1,727 more homes than required – and the latest Government proposals appear to let us take this into account when drawing up our new local plan, reducing the number of new homes we need to take by the same figure.
This is promising, although the proposed amendments would have to refer to completions, and not just planning permissions, for us to benefit.
The proposals also remove the need to add a 5% “buffer” to our housing figure when we calculate each year whether sufficient homes will realistically be built in the following five years.
Our current figure, according to the formula, is 781 new homes a year – removing 40 homes on top of this for five years effectively removes 200 homes over the five year period.
As it stands, our requirement over a 15-year period is 11,715 new homes – that’s 15 x 781 a year.
If we are able to offset past over delivery, this may be reduced to around 10,000 homes.
As well as a lower housing number, we believe our borough needs time to recover from the continuous housing development that has occurred over the past few decades, as do many in the Southeast.
New communities, in particular, need time to settle and for infrastructure to catch up.
We need to ensure that enough new schools, open spaces, doctors’ surgeries, hospital beds, roads, cycleways, footpaths, sports facilities and more have been provided before further significant development takes place.
We’re required to have an up-to-date local plan, and our hope is to move forward with one based on a lower housing requirement across the borough.
It must allow for more affordable homes for our local people, and for the new homes of the future to be suitably adapted to be more energy efficient.
We’ve declared a climate emergency and pledged to do all we can to address it, so we need to start planning now.
We must protect our important green spaces, ancient woodland and other open spaces for our children, grandchildren and beyond, as well as ensuring that new and existing residents aren’t affected by physical and mental health hazards like noise and air pollution.
Once the changes to national planning policy are confirmed, there will be an opportunity to review how development is best managed moving forward in line with the new rules, including where, when and how sites are proposed to be allocated for housing and other uses.
Please respond to the government’s consultation, a link is below.
Cllr Clive Jones is the leader of Wokingham Borough Council and member for Hawkedon ward
