You can tell there is an election coming. If you live in the Arborfield, Barkham, Swallowfield or Shinfield parts of the Wokingham Constituency the latest Liberal Democrat newsletter will recently have dropped through your door, with a number of items relating to the development, and the top story highlighting an issue we have been highlighting over the past few months, that Crest Nicholson are proposing to build houses beyond the developable area set down in the Arborfield Garrison Supplementary Planning Document. The most obvious place is on what are currently playing fields and public green space around the junction of Sheerlands Road and Baird Road, but they are also squeezing in strips of development adjacent to the protected moat over near the Garrison main gate, building right up to the A327 including in the triangle of land that sits in Swallowfield Parish Council area, and building closer to the various streams and the lake all across the development.
So why are the Liberal Democrats interested in a corner of the playing fields in Arborfield? There is no local election here for another three years, and the votes of a few residents of Arborfield are hardly likely to swing the seat for them at the General Election. They often tend to avoid too much discussion of Arborfield anyway as the local Conservatives invariably start throwing around all sorts of other figures as to how many houses the Liberal Democrats wanted to put at Arborfield in previous plans. The reason is that the issue here highlights a problem that could exist across all the strategic development locations in the borough.
Lets play a game of spot the difference.
This first image is taken from the Crest Nicholson Planning Application and is a copy of a plan originally produced by Wokingham Borough Council for the Supplementary Planning Document for the Strategic Development Location. This is a document they spent a lot of time consulting with local residents on, and which residents have been told would protect their interests and ensure we got the kind of development everybody wanted. Things to note in particular are the green area around the top of Sheerlands Road, the main avenue being a continuation of Princess Marina Drive, and the existing community centre marked as being retained.
This image is again taken from the Crest Nicholson Planning Application, and shows the same general area, but has area BB2 on what is green space on the Wokingham Borough Supplementary Planning Document plan, area K again on an area marked as green space, and the existing community centre, along with the facilities for the nursery and pre-school, all of which the council said should be retained disappear under housing area L.
Not surprisingly Crest Nicholson spend a lot of time justifying why they are diverging from the Supplementary Planning Document, essentially they are challenging the document through the planning process. Elsewhere in the application they also present a potted history of occasions when Wokingham Borough Council planning policy and plans have been challenged, and when they have lost.
Although there is a lot of text in the document, the fundamental point of contention is pretty simple, that it is not possible to build the number of houses that the core strategy and supplementary planning document requires, at the density that the core strategy and supplementary planning document requires, and in the designated development areas that the core strategy and supplementary planning document requires. Crest Nicholson are choosing to try to meet the density and housing number targets at the expense of the developable area, pushing out onto land that was supposed to be protected and into areas that are liable to flood according to their own flood survey.
Which brings us back to why the Liberal Democrats are interested. We’re not the only strategic development location laid down in the core strategy, and we’re not the only strategic development location where the concerns of existing residents are included in the supplementary planning document, and we’re not the only strategic development location where residents have been assured that our interests would be protected by those documents, there are three others across the borough – this is a borough and constituency wide issue.
Ensuring that there is enough developable area to contain the required number of houses at the required density is pretty fundamental, if there are similar fundamental errors in the core strategy and supplementary planning documents, such that developers are able to challenge and ignore them in the other strategic development locations this is a pretty worrying state of affairs given the assurances residents have been given over the protection the core strategy would give us. Having fundamental errors such that developers can successfully challenge yet more elements of Wokingham Borough planning policy leaves us as local residents exposed to whatever developers want to do. As we have discovered many times over the years the developers have deeper pockets and more money to spend on lawyers to get their plans pushed through than the council will ever be able to afford to stop them…
Spot the Difference
You can tell there is an election coming. If you live in the Arborfield, Barkham, Swallowfield or Shinfield parts of the Wokingham Constituency the latest Liberal Democrat newsletter will recently have dropped through your door, with a number of items relating to the development, and the top story highlighting an issue we have been highlighting over the past few months, that Crest Nicholson are proposing to build houses beyond the developable area set down in the Arborfield Garrison Supplementary Planning Document. The most obvious place is on what are currently playing fields and public green space around the junction of Sheerlands Road and Baird Road, but they are also squeezing in strips of development adjacent to the protected moat over near the Garrison main gate, building right up to the A327 including in the triangle of land that sits in Swallowfield Parish Council area, and building closer to the various streams and the lake all across the development.
So why are the Liberal Democrats interested in a corner of the playing fields in Arborfield? There is no local election here for another three years, and the votes of a few residents of Arborfield are hardly likely to swing the seat for them at the General Election. They often tend to avoid too much discussion of Arborfield anyway as the local Conservatives invariably start throwing around all sorts of other figures as to how many houses the Liberal Democrats wanted to put at Arborfield in previous plans. The reason is that the issue here highlights a problem that could exist across all the strategic development locations in the borough.
Lets play a game of spot the difference.
Not surprisingly Crest Nicholson spend a lot of time justifying why they are diverging from the Supplementary Planning Document, essentially they are challenging the document through the planning process. Elsewhere in the application they also present a potted history of occasions when Wokingham Borough Council planning policy and plans have been challenged, and when they have lost.
Although there is a lot of text in the document, the fundamental point of contention is pretty simple, that it is not possible to build the number of houses that the core strategy and supplementary planning document requires, at the density that the core strategy and supplementary planning document requires, and in the designated development areas that the core strategy and supplementary planning document requires. Crest Nicholson are choosing to try to meet the density and housing number targets at the expense of the developable area, pushing out onto land that was supposed to be protected and into areas that are liable to flood according to their own flood survey.
Which brings us back to why the Liberal Democrats are interested. We’re not the only strategic development location laid down in the core strategy, and we’re not the only strategic development location where the concerns of existing residents are included in the supplementary planning document, and we’re not the only strategic development location where residents have been assured that our interests would be protected by those documents, there are three others across the borough – this is a borough and constituency wide issue.
Ensuring that there is enough developable area to contain the required number of houses at the required density is pretty fundamental, if there are similar fundamental errors in the core strategy and supplementary planning documents, such that developers are able to challenge and ignore them in the other strategic development locations this is a pretty worrying state of affairs given the assurances residents have been given over the protection the core strategy would give us. Having fundamental errors such that developers can successfully challenge yet more elements of Wokingham Borough planning policy leaves us as local residents exposed to whatever developers want to do. As we have discovered many times over the years the developers have deeper pockets and more money to spend on lawyers to get their plans pushed through than the council will ever be able to afford to stop them…
Share this: