A Quick Summary for New Visitors

Firstly a welcome for people newly discovering this site. With the delivery of thousands of letters from Wokingham Borough Council across the affected areas of the borough, the first of which arrived yesterday we have a significant increase in people visiting our site and in enquiries. Please bear with us if we don’t reply immediately. Please sign up to our mailing list, Facebook page or Twitter feed if you have not already done so to keep up to date.

For the benefit of everybody we thought we’d give a quick summary:

• The one thing you can’t do in this consultation is object to the principle of building houses – Wokingham Borough Council decided to adopt Arborfield Garrison and surrounding land in Barkham, Finchampstead and Swallowfield as a strategic development location in October 2011, you can see some of the media coverage of that here.
• This application is only for part of the land, there will be a second application for an additional 1,500 houses that you will be asked to comment on that is expected in a few months.
• The MoD is closing the garrison, but they are retaining housing on the site – the upshot of this is that army personnel who currently walk to work on the base will be joining the commuters going to other nearby bases such as Aldershot.
• There are a number of landowners involved, the Defence Infrastructure Organisation, Mr and Mrs Kenyon and the Aegean Trust are in a consortium, the Finchampstead based Marino Family Trust are separate.
• Whilst of late the public facing documents tend to talk about a village and play up the rural aspects of the development, reading the actual planning application documents in many places they talk about this as the centre of a new town.
• From the MoD point of view, underscored by their comments at recent announcement of a main developer this is about making as much money as possible to finance the new base in Wiltshire.
• Given that the principle of building is adopted, the developer only has to prove that their development will produce “nil detriment” on the surrounding area – how they propose to do that is explained in the traffic documents, and in pretty well all cases is by installing traffic lights at key junctions such as California Crossroads and the various roundabouts in Barkham.
• The plans have no details at all on the proposed Arborfield Bypass, as the developer wants to put traffic lights at Arborfield Cross instead. Nor do they have any mitigation plans for Eversley, which they do not seem to regard as their problem.

We are currently studying the application and will make further comment once we have looked in more detail.

Please note that in common with all Wokingham Borough Council consultations the volume of responses is important, so for example a petition of any size would be considered one response as would a letter from one person. As a result rather than one letter per family, one differently worded letter from each member of your household would make more impact in terms of responses.