As you may have seen in local newspapers or heard on local radio, on Wednesday the Wokingham Borough Council Executive voted to adopt all of the strategic development location documents including those for the Arborfield Garrison SDL.
The vote was not unanimous. The Arborfield local councillor Gary Cowan tried to move a number of amendments to the plans, resulting in the meeting being adjourned at one point whilst all the executive went into an anteroom to discuss Gary’s proposed changes in private, whilst some changes were made all of the proposals were not included and Gary voted against the adoption of the documents. We would like to record our thanks to Gary for trying to do what he could, and in particular sticking by his principles and promises to his local residents despite what we are sure was a lot of pressure from Cllr David Lee and the other members of the Executive to show a united front.
Whilst it is certainly massively disappointing that the council adopted the plans, and our neighbours in Eversley were truly incensed by the adoption given that they had found fundamental flaws in the traffic modelling, the fight is not over. Despite a truly patronising statement from Cllr Rob Stanton following a conversation he had had with his opposite number at Hampshire County Council, saying that he’d been assured that the county weren’t going to ask for a judicial review of the plans, this certainly isn’t backed up by the information coming from our neighbours in Eversley. The plans have also been adopted despite Wokingham’s own traffic survey indicating that even if they built all the planned road schemes (including a few which don’t have complete funding or plans) they still would not achieve nil detriment – in fact they indicated an average increase of 10% in journey times across the borough. The comment from Cllr Angus Ross at the meeting was that it was now up to the developers of the schemes to prove nil detriment in their planning applications – since those applications will also have to conform to SDL plans that have been proved not to achieve that there are certainly a number of battles to come.
