Last autumn, Wokingham Borough Council approved the Local Plan proposal to build nearly 4,000 dwellings on countryside between Arborfield Cross and the Winnersh parish boundary. No-one seriously disputes the likely consequences: thousands more vehicles on our roads, thousands of school children needing places at already overstretched local schools, and several thousand more names added to GP surgeries’ patients register. If adopted, there is no doubt that this plan will significantly degrade the quality of life in Shinfield, Arborfield and nearby areas.
So what position do our local politicians take on this debacle they’ve presided over?
They’re busy playing the blame game.
The Lib Dem Council Executive, about to send off the Plan for approval by the government’s planning inspectors, say they know the Hall Farm proposal isn’t perfect, but it’s the least bad option. As for Wokingham Tories, they now say they are against it, and in September they actually tried to get the proposal removed from the Local Plan. The Lib Dems have fired back by saying that it was the Tories who put Hall Farm in the Plan to start with.
Actors in a tragedy?
Well, I’m writing this blog piece during the Christmas period, and it’s the season of goodwill. So I’m going to cut the Lib Dems some slack. I can accept they personally, as councillors, genuinely care about their community, aren’t happy to be inflicting this plan on Shinfield and Arborfield, and would prefer not to have to. There, I said it.
But that goes for the Tories too. Both parties in power at Shute End - before and after May 2022 - claimed they were being forced to work to higher housing targets than they wanted. Perhaps neither Tories nor Lib Dems really wanted to go for the Hall Farm proposal. Perhaps, like actors in a classic Greek tragedy they found themselves in the grip of more forces more powerful than them, and impelled on to do bad things. A melodramatic comparison, you might say. Maybe, but the season of goodwill is the time for showing a generous spirit of mind, not finding fault.
In that spirit, I want to suggest that just as the Hall Farm proposal wasn’t a Lib Dem plan, it wasn’t a Tory plan either.
To see how this might be so, we have to go back and look at how the Hall Farm scheme originated.
How it began
Nearly five years ago, WBC put out for consultation the first draft of a Local Plan that was very different from the current version. That draft proposed building 15,000 dwellings in the Grazeley area, which would take pretty much all the housing numbers required by the government over the Plan period. The public consultation ended on 20th March 2020. The Council received a rude shock just before Christmas that year, when it was announced that the Grazeley plan could not go ahead, as the emergency evacuation zone around the AWE site at Burghfield was being extended to cover Grazeley. Therefore Wokingham council planners would have to come up with a completely rewritten Local Plan. What would this look like? The then Council Leader John Halsall admitted that the Council were now ‘in limbo’, but were looking at alternative sites.
Plan B
Nearly a year later, WBC announced what the alternative was. It was to build 4,500 dwellings at Hall Farm, plus various other smaller sites.
This is how the Executive member for planning, Wayne Smith, stated the position at a Council Executive meeting on 12th November 2021: ’Following technical appraisals by our Officers, with external support from AECOM, and discussions with the cross-party group of Councillors, the recommended strategy proposes the creation of a new sustainable community at land at Hall Farm / Loddon Valley’.
‘Sustainable community’? Really? In the 2020 version of the Local Plan, the Hall Farm site had been evaluated for
sustainability by the U.S. infrastructure consulting firm AECOM, mentioned by Cllr Smith. The site received rather poor ratings. It was put at the second-lowest level on a 4-point scale for Accessibility, Air Quality, and Transport. Now, in the 2021 version, it suddenly scored top rating on Accessibility and Transport, and second-highest on Air Quality. Residents in the area tell me the air quality, accessibility and transport at Hall Farm seemed no different in 2021 from 2020. So how did AECOM, which both times carried out the LP sustainability appraisal for the Council, come to change its view so radically? We might well wonder.
Group work
In any case, we were told the content of Local Plan draft was the work of council officers, AECOM, and a cross-party group of councillors. Dubbed the Planning Policy Members Working Group, the latter comprised about eight councillors, and its meetings were generally attended by various council officers as well. No information about the group appears on the WBC website, however, so no minutes are available as to whether, and if so when, it discussed the Hall Farm alternative to Grazeley, as Cllr Smith implied it had.
Belonging to this working group would have been the only opportunity any elected councillors, LibDem or Tory, would’ve had to become aware of the evolving Hall Farm proposal, let alone discuss it. No Executive meetings and no meetings of Full Council up to November 2021 contain any reference in the minutes to Hall Farm, or to progress on revising the Local Plan. A LibDem councillor did once ask earlier in 2021 when it was to be published, but she was answered by the executive member only in vague terms.
Tories against Hall Farm
What is clear is that once the Local Plan Update (LPU) was published at the end of 2021, Conservative councillors and campaigners in the area took a firm stand against Hall Farm. This is shown below in the leaflet they distributed at the time, urging residents to express their views in the ongoing consultation on the LPU. The Shinfield Tory councillors/candidates said the development proposal (called ‘the Arborfield SDL’ in the leaflet) would mean increased
traffic congestion and increased pressure on local GP and school facilities, and they pointed to the availability of alternatives better served by existing transport infrastructure. Clearly then, there was no Wokingham Tory party whip on the issue, and Conservatives were free to oppose the Hall Farm proposal.
It’s true that the Conservative group leader and Wokingham Council Leader John Halsall had in early 2021 talked to Reading University about increasing their housing offer at Hall Farm from 1,000, rejected in the first version of the LPU the previous year, to 4,500 houses. However, he did not use his position to stop Shinfield Tories taking a stand against the Hall Farm proposal.
There was a Planning Performance Agreement between WBC and Reading University (copy obtained through a FOI request by SOLVE), by which the Council officers helped the University and its developer associates to firm up their housing plans. But it was put in place only after Halsall’s Conservative administration fell from power in May 2022, and long after his meeting with the University.
A joint recommendation
So how far was Hall Farm development a ‘Tory plan’? Sure, it was presented and publicised by the Tory-run Executive and in particular by the Executive member for the local plan, Cllr Wayne Smith. But he was speaking for a position adopted and recommended by the people tasked with revising the Local Plan - council officers working with councillors from both major parties, not just the Tories. Putting Hall Farm in the 2021 LPU was evidently a collective recommendation, involving a cross-party group of councillors. This means the Tory Executive acted in 2021 in the same way as the LibDem executive acted later. Both adopted the recommendation of council officers and councillors from the two major parties.
So now as 2025 beckons, let’s take the opportunity at this time of year, to show goodwill, recognise that the Hall Farm plan was, so to speak, of mixed parentage, and move on.
One thing’s for sure. If the plan is as disastrous as it looks, and - let’s hope - gets a thumbs-down from the Planning Inspectorate, no-one will ever want to acknowledge it as theirs.
Pat Phillipps
Comments