Last week Conservative councillors successfully brought forward a motion committing the Council to campaign against the Government’s enormous increase in housing numbers.
Before the election Labour promised a wholesale shake up of planning, including relaxing of rules protecting the Green Belt and an increase in house building targets. Keir Starmer had previously said: “We choose the builders, not the blockers.” In Wokingham Borough, this has meant Labour almost doubling our housing targets.
A few years ago, the previous Conservative administration successfully campaigned to halve the Borough’s housing target. As a result of our campaign, and others, the rules were changed to meet local demand and build more houses in big conurbations where there is greater need, more brownfield land available and where the gap between prices and incomes is higher.
Our motion requires the current Liberal Democrat administration to campaign against the Labour Government’s reversal of our good work, namely to nearly double the Borough’s housing targets to an undeliverable level while reducing targets for London where house prices are highest, and other major cities.
At the Council meeting, my colleague Cllr Charles Margetts and other Conservative councillors spoke with passion about the need to protect our countryside and to build sustainable numbers of homes with the proper infrastructure to support them.
Wokingham Borough’s character, with its green spaces, and small towns and villages, is one of the reasons people choose to live here.
There is consensus among political parties that there is the need for some amount of new housing. Conservatives want to see a sustainable number of homes in suitable locations that meet residents’ needs. Instead, Labour’s housing targets, and threats to take away local decision-making on planning, would see our Borough at the mercy of developers who are uninterested in ensuring we have the right homes in the right numbers, in the right places.
We were pleased that Liberal Democrat councillors joined us and supported our motion. Labour councillors’ response to the motion, however, was extremely disappointing. One said of housing that “we should have more of it”. Another councillor, who previously criticised calls to reinstate Winter Fuel Payments for pensioners, dismissed people who are concerned about housing because they already own a home, adding “these houses are going to be built”. Unsurprisingly, Labour refused to support our motion – once again choosing to back the Labour Government over Wokingham Borough residents.
Labour also argued that building more houses will make the Borough more affordable. However, new houses have been built across the Borough for years and during that time we have only seen house prices and rents increase.
What cannot be ignored is the more immediate threat of development facing the Borough, unleashed on us by the Liberal Democrat administration. Last month, we witnessed Liberal Democrat councillors tear up repeated promises to protect parts of our Borough such as Hall Farm by pushing through their local plan with support from the Labour Group Leader.
Before being elected a Liberal Democrat councillor for Wokingham Without started a petition against 830 new houses. In September, he voted to build 1,100 there.
Another Liberal Democrat councillor in the same area wrote in a leaflet in 2022 “opposing… plans for major development in the countryside around Wokingham Without and Finchampstead”. Yet in September he voted to build those areas.
Wokingham’s current MP and the former Liberal Democrat Leader of the Council, Clive Jones, had campaigned against development at Hall Farm before his election but it is his party who have voted to build 3,900 houses there.
There is a clear political divide on housing in Wokingham Borough. On one side you have a Liberal Democrat Group that has approved a plan to build a vast swathe of new housing in green spaces, and a Labour Group parroting Keir Starmer’s lines on doubling our housing targets. And on the other side, you have Conservative councillors willing to take a stand, take the fight to the Government to get sensible housing numbers, and ensure new homes go in the right places.
