WHY I’m a NIMBY!

Some context: It is 3.48 in the morning and I cannot sleep. I get up, make a cup of tea and fire up my laptop. Funnily enough the day shift (my wife) is still on her computer, working on spreadsheets for the pharmaceutical company that pay our bills. On her way to bed she warns me not to let my emotions get the better of me, and I will try to keep that in mind as I write, but it is not easy.

The reason I woke up feeling angry and betrayed, the reason I cannot just turn over and go back to sleep, the reason I must resume my somewhat aggressive keyboard bashing is the realisation that all I have held near and dear in my life, throughout the entirety of my 68 years on earth, has turned to dust before my eyes.

I refer to my lifelong belief in the fairness and impartiality of the great British Broadcasting Corporation. I grew up with the BBC (unlike my wife who grew up abroad) and I have fervently defended it against any and all detractors. Paying my licence fee was more than just an act of compliance, it was an act of faith.

I usually wake up at 06.00 to the Today programme on Radio 4. If I need to get in the car, I drive around to Radio 3. When I make dinner in the evening Evan Davies is there at my side, calmly talking me through the complex issues of the day. I watch Netflix, of course I do. I have a Spotify account, it is as essential as my book and cocoa at bed time. I subscribe to the Grauniad and Private Eye (Geddit?) but for most of my day to day information and entertainment I am dependent like a junkie on my daily fix of the good old Beeb.

But now my faith is gone. I believe in the BBC no more. From the Wooden Tops and the Flower Pot Men, to Dads Army and It Aint Half Hot Mum, Top of the Pops to the Old Grey Whistle Test, Morcombe and Wise to Monty Python, it is gone, dead, deceased, no more. As dead as the proverbial parrot. I have been let down badly, and it hurts.

South Today interviewed me yesterday to talk about Angela Rayners proposed changes to the National Planning Policy Framework. (NPPF) Now I am not a big fan of this programme, it clashes with me eating my dinner for a start, but I am a big fan of promoting the cause of Save Our Loddon Valley at Hall Farm (SOLVE Hall Farm). So I spent maybe 15 minutes in the morning talking to BBC Radio Berkshire, then later that day an hour talking a reporter from BBC TV.

I will be honest at this point and come clean. I am flattered that I am the BBC’s go to NIMBY. My cause needs the oxygen of publicity to survive and grow and until I start my own podcast or YouTube Channel this seemed like a good way to get it. Wrong!

The radio “interview” was live so I managed to make a couple of points before I was switched off, but the T.V. interview was edited down from an hour spent in the company of a “reporter” to less than a minute of fatuous time wasting. What has made my blood boil so is the way that all the arguments given against building in my “back yard” and all the arguments for building elsewhere (admittedly someone else’s “back yard”) were completely ignored.

The whole point of doing the interview was to make explicit the reasons WHY I am a NIMBY. Not just to parade myself as another sad objector getting in the way of what is now rapidly becoming a national crusade to “rebuild Britain”. The radio interview is no longer available, the TV Clip is available below.

So what did they, and therefore you, miss? Here is a “short” list of all the reasons I gave, or would like to have given, as to WHY I am a NIMBY.

• Travel & Transport. This proposal is car dependent. Millions of pounds that could be spent on the much vaunted “affordable” housing will be spent on a new bridge over the M4, taking thousands of car journeys from the houses and onto the already overcrowded and polluting roads of Shinfield, Arborfield, Winnersh and Early.
  

• These houses are NOT affordable unless you have rich parents, a job paying a great deal of money, or you have just sold a property somewhere else. I know, my son left the area years ago. “Help to buy” only increases house prices. Developers release houses slowly to keep prices high. Councils and Government have not only stopped building “social housing” they have flogged off most of what they had to keep Social Services running.
  

• This site (Hall Farm) where it is proposed to build 4,500 houses is 517 Hectares of green space. That is 1,277 football pitches of biodiversity, ancient woodland, flood plain, hedgerow, valued local heritage and breathing space for locals. It is land that could be used for growing food, or planting trees, or just breathing fresh air.

• We have already accepted 3,500 houses at Arborfield Green and 3,000 houses at Shinfield yet we still don’t have the school places, the medical services or the community facilities we were promised over 10 years ago. 97% of new houses built in Wokingham over the past 15 years have been in the South of the Borough, see blow.

• Other sites are better suited to being developed but are being ignored. Twyford and Ashridge are two such examples. Sadly, given Ms Rayners keenness to concrete over the countryside it may well be that our new mandatory targets (gone up by 75% to 1300 per year) will mean everything gets built on, but there is still time (for now) to stop this happening?
  

• Flood risk as identified by the Environment Agency is going up due to climate change. Not only is climate change real, but it is also accelerating. Building on green field sites will make it accelerate even faster. We are destroying our heritage, flogging off the family silver, spending our children’s inheritance. This is incredibly short sighted.
  

• Birth rates are going down in the UK, yet demand for housing is going up. We are a migrant species, and my ancestors came here looking for a better way of life along with everyone else’s on this island (Just go back far enough). If we just keep building on greenfield sites the entire country will be one vast housing estate, car park, supermarket, wind farm or solar farm and all our food and goods will be imported from abroad. We need to have a proper, grown up debate about what kind of houses we need, where we are going to put them and how we are going to pay for them without it costing us the Earth.

• There are houses that are empty. There are brownfield sites ripe for redevelopment. There are sites with planning permission that land banking developers are not building on because they make better profits that way. We do not need to destroy our countryside.

• There are large swathes of this country desperate for people and jobs that would welcome more house building, providing it came with the community resources needed to make it viable.

• Anti-Social behaviour and mental health issues are an indication of just how poorly we are treating so many members of our society. I cannot believe that the self-destructiveness we witness in our world is inevitable, or necessary. It can be countered, and the best way I know of to do that is to learn about our part in the natural world through caring for it and nurturing our co-inhabitants.

• There are endangered species in the area that could be wiped out completely if this site is developed. I refer to the White Clawed Crayfish, currently just about surviving in Barkham Brook, despite the best efforts of Thames Water to fill this waterway with sewage.

• I am very fortunate. I live in a nice home, with a nice garden. Not everyone has access to such things and I am not trying to deny anyone else the same things. I get it quite a lot though, particularly on "social" media, the comment along the lines of "Bet he owns his own home". For clarity, I live in what was my Parents home. They came here in the late 1970s when this area was "proper" countryside and houses were much cheaper. It is around 200 years old and I bought it from my family in 2013. I love living here. It is a real privilege, one for which I am very grateful. I do my utmost every day to "pay back" to society whatever I can afford and I am very lucky to have a wife who works hard and is prepared to help me in this endeavour. I wish we could all be NIMBYs, but of course we cannot, the houses we need must go somewhere.

• Can't we just agree that we need to consider carefully what houses go where before Wokingham is joined to Reading, Reading is joined to London, and London is joined to the rest of the world?
  

• I could go on but my eyes are getting tired, my brain is fogging up, and the Today Programme has already started. Time for a nice cup of tea and a snooze to Radio 4?

• Till the next time.

Paul Stevens