Happy new year. I hope 2026 is successful and fulfilling for you and your family.
For Wokingham Borough Council, the year ahead will be challenging, especially as our government funding has been cut significantly. Some difficult decisions on spending and income generation are inevitable, given the reduction in our resources.
But, just before Christmas, we received the good news that the new local development plan, submitted to the planning inspectorate last February, had successfully passed the first stage of its formal examination.
The focus of the stage-one hearings, held in November, was on the legal compliance and soundness of the plan’s overall strategy for delivering the new housing numbers required of the council by government. Now the council’s plan has successfully passed this test, we move on to consideration of more detailed policy matters at the next round of hearings, due to take place in the spring.
I attended nearly all the first hearing sessions, which lasted for a week. I was deeply impressed by our officers’ outstanding performance. No question discomforted them; their answers were calm, considered and persuasively detailed. At the end of the first-round proceedings, the lead inspector gave unusually fulsome praise to our officers for the way in which they conducted themselves.
The council is fortunate to have such an excellent professional officer team, which not only defended the plan so effectively at the examination but also did the work in assessing sites promoted by landowners and developers and gathering evidence to support their recommendations.
Preparation of the plan now at examination began under the Conservative administration before May 2022, with nearly all the allocated sites, including the strategic development location of Loddon Valley/Hall Farm, approved for inclusion in the draft plan by the Conservative executive. The Liberal Democrat administration that succeeded the Conservatives reassessed the allocated sites but concluded that they were all based on thorough assessment and appraisal by professionals and there was no sound planning justification for changing them. The new administration did, however, add further policies, such as on energy efficiency in new homes and higher percentages of Affordable Housing on major development sites. The Liberal Democrats also increased the number of designated green spaces, in or on the edge of settlements, which have the same level of protection against development as the green belt in the open countryside. The plan, therefore, should properly be viewed as the council’s plan, not the plan of any particular political party.
The plan’s success is important to the whole borough. If it had been found seriously wanting at the stage one hearings, we would be obliged to start afresh and draw up a replacement plan under the government’s new 2024 rules, rather than the old 2023 rules against which the submitted plan is being assessed.
Just to remind everyone, the old, 2023, rules require us to facilitate the delivery of 748 new dwellings a year; under the 2024 rules that goes up to over 1,300 a year.
Furthermore, if we had to prepare a replacement plan, every part of the borough would be exposed – for the whole period of its formulation – to inappropriate speculative development that we would have very little power to stop. That speculative development would almost certainly come with far less infrastructure to mitigate its impact than if development were delivered through a plan-led approach.
There are good reasons, then, for us all to be pleased that the new local plan has successfully negotiated the first stage of its examination. Let’s hope we are as successful in the next stage, when the inspectors consider such matters as our bold new policies on Affordable Housing and energy efficiency in new homes, and our designation of protected green spaces and areas of landscape value.
By Cllr Stephen Conway
