Broken Promises.
We tried hard last night to get the Lib Dems and Labour to think again on the local plan, Labour were obviously conflicted and had a free vote so some voted with us but not enough!
The nonsense spouted about the alleged mitigation of transport impacts of Hall Farm was astonishing, especially as no one in the room appeared to have seen the transport design.
As I was reminded when, on the way to the meeting, I sat in a queue on the Lower Earley Way just before Mill Lane, this plan will be a disaster for both Shinfield and the residents of Earley and Winnersh who will have to live with the traffic impact and the loss of countryside.
And then there were the cynically broken promises:
• Marc Brunel-Walker started a petition in Wokingham Without against 830 new houses, he voted tonight for 1,100?
• A leaflet put on behalf of Jordan Montgomery in May 2022 said, “The Lib Dems are opposing… plans for major development in the countryside around Wokingham Without and Finchampstead which they believe to be unsustainable.” He voted in favour.
• 3900 houses in Hall Farm, which the previous Liberal Democrat leader was front and centre to the campaign to oppose, cannot all be built in the plan period.
________________________________________________
My speech in full is below:
“This plan is more than 2 years late. The Liberal Democrat administration got themselves elected on the back of a promise to bring in a new Local Plan and save the Borough from excessive development.
Instead, they’ve spent the last two years avoiding the question.
Then we had the farce of the last Council meeting, in which the Leader of the Council tried to claim that after everything the administration had said, and after going on 28 months of sitting around, only now do they discover that they couldn’t amend the draft Local Plan.
Fortuitously, the Liberal Democrats came to this realisation AFTER all-out elections on new boundaries, with another two years before residents could give their response at the ballot box.
The issue with these various claims is that Officers confirmed before the meeting that the plan could be amended, that written legal advice didn’t exist and have since confirmed that sites can be removed from the plan without permission of site promoters.
This is a Local Plan littered with the broken promises made by the Liberal Democrats to the people of this Borough.
The paper commits the Council to building houses in numbers which were opposed by the ruling group when they stood for election, and were often core platforms in their successful campaigns to be elected.
They include:
• Marc Brunel-Walker started a petition in Wokingham Without against 830 new houses, will he tonight be voting for 1,100?
• A leaflet put on behalf of Jordan Montgomery in May 2022 said, “The Lib Dems are opposing… plans for major development in the countryside around Wokingham Without and Finchampstead which they believe to be unsustainable.” How will he vote tonight?
• 3900 houses in Hall Farm, which the previous Liberal Democrat leader was front and centre to the campaign to oppose, and which cannot all be built in the plan period.
And as much as they try to duck and dive from responsibility be under no illusion this is their plan:
As recently as February this year a Lib Dem leaflet in Hillside said, under a headline of “your Lib Dem council is”, “setting out OUR plans for house-building and development, to replace the Local Plan that expires in 2026”
And in September 2022, then Leader of Wokingham Borough Council now Lib Dem MP, said in this Chamber, “decisions on the sites to be included in the new local plan will be made by councillors”. Demonstrating that at that time he and presumably along with his Executive believed that it was possible for councillors to change the sites in the Plan then and that they would do that.
Before I go over what we oppose, let’s look at the good in this plan. There are undoubtedly some things which we could support. At the top of the list absolutely has to be the commitment to protection of the Green Belt and urban green spaces such as Swallows Meadow and Area DD. These are fundamental non-negotiables for me, as I know they are for my Conservative colleagues here tonight.
There must be a united front from this Council that the Green Belt
should be protected, a message we should send both to developers and to the new Labour Government.
I hope we’ll hear the same sentiments echoed by Labour councillors tonight.
I’m pleased to see the route for the third Thames Bridge being protected. Although I am concerned that this route will mean a lot of traffic through Earley and I believe it would be better connected to the A329.
It’s also fantastic to see a commitment to physical segregation of new cycleways and providing safe and secure cycle storage.
All these issues are one on which I have been working for years – both as an Executive Member or as a backbencher.
That’s the good – there’s a lot of bad points. Before we can even get into the substance of the sites, we have to address the completely undemocratic way in which the Liberal Democrat administration has approached this plan.
Just over a week ago we were given this monstrosity – not even all together, but some of us got them and were expected to share with others, because they hadn’t all been printed when the agenda was supposed to come out. As though the administration somehow didn’t know this meeting was coming and didn’t have time to prepare for it.
We’ve been given a week to read, digest, and more importantly UNDERSTAND more than 1,600 pages of complex planning policy documents. We don’t do this with the budget, we didn’t do it with the much smaller local transport plan yet this is a document that will impact on the Borough and our residents for decades to come. This is fundamentally undemocratic.
In our best attempt to prepare for this meeting, Conservative councillors have posed questions to officers. I am very grateful for the hard work of officers and the time they have spared this week.
Nevertheless, even today, many of those questions haven’t been fully answered. But we’re expected to vote, nonetheless.
We have little clarity on what this Plans actually commits the authority to – what is binding, and what is merely indicative. Crucial transport documents showing mitigations have not yet even been released.
Worst of all, the publication of the draft Plan on the same day as the agenda meant that residents many residents would not have realised it was possible to table a question, those that did had just FIVE days to know the Plan had been published, read through the weighty tome, somehow wrap their head around it without the benefit of being able to ask officers, and then submit a question if they wanted to pose it tonight. It’s amazing that 3 people managed to get questions on the agenda at all, even if one of them is a former councillor.
Turning to the sites.
We have serious concerns about the impact on existing residents and traffic levels of developments at Barkham Square, Arborfield, Wokingham Without and Hall Farm. The plan goes to great lengths to pretend that all will be well, employment will be within the areas developed, and transport will be sustainable.
This ignores the fact that Hall Farm (or should I call it Loddon Valley Garden Village) will tip all the traffic from nearly 4,000 houses onto existing roads such as the Lower Earley Way or Mill Lane and Mole Road.
There are vague promises of road improvements, but some are not costed and all are not clear.
The Hall Farm development in particular, as set out in these plans, will never be sustainable. It has poor public transport links and is miles from the nearest station.
It is telling that the sustainable transport page talks about sponsoring improved links from Reading, such as the Heathrow rail link. But it is largely silent about how people are intended to get to Reading.
As we know many of these new residents will be commuting towards London and will naturally head for the M4 due to the lack of rail services. It is also noticeable that the only part of the Borough connected to London via the new Elizabeth Line has very little planned development.
Finally we come to the elephant in the room – the Labour governments housing targets.
Labour are proposing to almost double our housing target in Wokingham Borough to an eye watering 1,308 houses per year. At the same time, they’ve mysteriously decided to reduce targets for London and other major cities, where the gap between house prices and incomes are much higher and where the shortage of houses is acute. I’m sure this has nothing whatsoever to do with the number of Labour Cabinet Ministers who happen to have their constituencies in those cities…
I have seen no evidence that building more houses reduces prices. In fact, this paper says as much. But the whole basis of Labour Government policy is that more house building will increase affordability and that is how they have justified these increased targets. This makes no sense when they are decreasing the targets in London and other cities.
It also makes no sense to continue to cram yet more people into the already overheated South East. Instead the Government should be spreading economic growth to other areas of the country.
However, that is government policy so we will have to live with it, at least for the next 5 years. As a result, the minute the ink is dry on this plan, having spent in excess of £700,000 on the adoption process, the council will have to start again with a different plan to cope with the increased targets.
Nothing I have seen in these papers, and nothing I have heard from the Leader compels me to support this Local Plan. Unless I hear extremely convincing arguments or alternatives, I will vote against this proposal.
Like dodgy estate agents, Liberal Democrat leaders repeatedly mis-sold residents a vision of a brand new plan for housing to get you to buy their party at election time. Turns out there were many additional clauses in the small print, and the final product wasn’t what you were promised in the leaflet. The previous leader even ran off chasing a promotion as soon as he got residents to sign on the dotted line.
The proposal before us tonight stands on foundations that are rotten.
It is built on two years of doing nothing.
It is built on a false premise that sites can’t be changed.
It is built on a rush to outpace Labour’s higher housing targets.
It is built on wishful thinking and vague promises about transport and infrastructure.
And worst of all, it is built on cynicism. The cynicism of making promises, holding up progress to get the Liberal Democrats through local and general elections, and then admitting that actually you were never going to get what they sold you.”
