THE LEADER of the borough council has written to the secretary of state for housing over building targets for the borough.
Cllr John Halsall has penned a letter to Michael Gove MP calling for the required number of new houses to be dropped in Wokingham.
He invited Mr Gove to the borough to see for himself the work of the council, and how planning reforms could help the community.
Cllr Clive Jones, leader of the Wokingham Liberal Democrats, said that he welcomes the letter, but thinks that Cllr Halsall has only written to Mr Gove in reaction to a Lib Dem petition calling for the house numbers to be lowered.
“We have stunned the council leadership into some action at last,” Cllr Jones said. “[Cllr Halsall] should have been trying to get Gove to reduce the numbers a long time ago.”
Cllr Jones said Cllr Halsall does not explicitly call for Wokingham’s housing numbers to be reduced, and said that he “should have been more specific”.
In his letter, Cllr Halsall called for “urgent reform” of the current system, and said that it “must work for everyone”.
“It must be one of common sense and must be trusted by communities to be fair and consistent,” he wrote.
“Current national planning policy and guidance has lost sight of the big picture of housing land supply, by applying unchecked formulae, and inviting speculation.”
Cllr Halsall said that the housing numbers for Wokingham borough must be “realistic and proportionate” and consider historical housebuilding as well as whether there are more “opportunities” for development or not.
Almost 6,500 homes have been delivered since 2016, Cllr Halsall said in his letter.
But Cllr Jones said that around 11,000 homes have been built since 2006, and that this statistic should have been included too.
“The government’s focus and energy should be firmly on the real issues of non-delivery,” Cllr Halsall wrote. “Government thinking to date has been on granting additional planning permissions in the hope that someone will build.”
Cllr Halsall called for the five-year housing land supply test to be removed, and said that it has led to developers suggesting uncertainty in supply in the hope of their scheme being approved.
“The best thing the government could do would be to delete it without delay as suggested in the white paper,” Cllr Halsall wrote. “The test unfairly places the outcome on the willingness, not the capability of developers who can choose when to build out a scheme.
“Developers are using the existing five-year housing land supply rules and the resetting principle to wipe out the relevance of past oversupply to circumvent the plan-led approach to challenge us with proposals for small and medium sized ad-hoc largely greenfield development proposals without providing any infrastructure.
“This ties up our resources in knots and makes the strategic approach look fruitless and toothless to protect itself.”
Cllr Halsall told Mr Gove that the method of calculating housebuilding targets has led many local authorities to be reliant on large scale developments.
“Delivery from such developments can be lumpy,” he wrote, “sometimes being higher, sometimes being lower, often because of infrastructure needs.
“Allowing planning authorities to take account of both over delivery and under delivery over time, would allow phases to be balanced out.”
Cllr Halsall was also concerned about the impact this is having on house prices.
He wrote: “The calculation of Local Housing Need is based on the presumption that oversupply will lower house prices in areas where they are high in relation to local incomes.
“There is no evidence that this has been the case in Wokingham; indeed, the opposite is true.”
Cllr Rachel Burgess, leader of Wokingham Labour, said that she is concerned about the “power” that developers are given in housebuilding.
“Cllr Halsall notes that developers are using the existing system to their own benefit – and they are being allowed to do so,” she said.
“Efforts to change the system will be in vain until the Conservative Party reduces the power they hand to developers.
“These developers have given millions of pounds in donations to the Conservative Party – truly eye watering sums – and they want to see a return on their investment.
“The unrealistically high housing numbers which continue to be imposed on the borough, and a lack of enough affordable housing, are symptoms of this Conservative-led imbalance of power in favour of developers.”
Cllr Jones said that he hopes residents will continue to sign the Liberal Democrat petition, and said that Cllr Halsall “should be encouraging residents to sign it” to show Mr Gove the strength of feeling in Wokingham.
For more information about the Liberal Democrat petition, visit: www.wokinghamlibdems.org.uk/housing
