This week we had another Arborfield Community Forum, held this time in the old Arborfield Garrison Community Centre, now being managed as the Arborfield Green Community Centre by Crest Nicholson.

Unlike some community forums in the past there weren’t any new announcements, but it did provide a good way to see a lot of the players building the Arborfield Strategic Development Location together in one place, as so often they will present whatever new development or plan they are putting forward in isolation.

Crest of course were there, and for a number of people the main topic of conversation was the development going on on the public open space they had fenced off and sold on to Westbuild Homes where the church car park used to be. Particular concerns were the absolute eye sore the developers had created digging a balancing pond in what was supposed to be retained public open space, and also that the night before the site had not stopped working at 6pm as they were supposed to. Crest have already taken Westbuild Homes to task over the late working, ironically for one of the most controversial parts of the development the site had bitten back and the reason for the late working was their drilling rig had got stuck, indeed you could see the drill stuck in the same spot for several days this week. With regards to the balancing pond with the current hot weather we’re stuck with it looking a mess for a while at least as any attempt to turf it or seed it at this point wouldn’t take. Crest were also presenting the plans for more blocks of flats for the rental market on a site next to the Bohunt School access road.

Moving on to the other large developer on site, back in March Legal and General the new owners of the southern part of the development went out to consultation on changing the agreed design and layout, and they were at the Community Forum presenting these new plans again. Much as when Crest took over the northern part this is really just a rearrangement rather than any major changes, so the second primary school on the site has been relocated to a more central location, and the employment area has been moved too. There is also a change to the routing of the Nine Mile Ride extension which may well serve to lower its attractiveness as a cut through.

There was also representation from Millgate Homes who have bought the parcel of land on the Rowcroft Barracks Princess Marina Drive directly adjacent to the Community Centre and St Eligius Community Church. This is going to be a small development of houses, with a block of apartments.

From the council there were two displays, the first was for what has provisionally been named Arborfield Primary School – although I’m sure it has been pointed out that it is in Barkham! This will initially be a two form entry school with provision for it to subsequently expand to three form entry as Arborfield Green is built out and with the plans for the Barkham Square extension to the development. Site wise it will be based around what was the third rugby pitch behind the wire on Biggs Lane.

The other council display was about the upcoming Arborfield Relief Road – the plans for this have been pretty stable for a number of months, but the more interesting part was the ongoing discussion over speed limits. As you may be aware there is currently a temporary 40mph speed limit from the Poperinghe Way roundabout down to the Church Road turn up to Farley Hill. This was always planned to be made permanent, indeed the Nine Mile Ride Extension Roundabout was designed and built for traffic to take it at 40mph. However the map the council had on display highlighted that Thames Valley Police had objected to the speed limit being cut to 40mph, so the council had a new plan that once the Arborfield Relief Road is open regularises the speed limit along the length of the A327 from the edge of Finchampstead to the Shinfield Science Park to 50mph. This involves cutting the limit from 60mph in some places and raising the 40mph in others, most notably past Poperinghe Way and the current pedestrian crossing before the new relief road splits off. In general having a consistent limit seems like a good idea rather than the current limits that change up and down, however we do think the council needs to look carefully at the crossing by Poperinghe Way as we know people already have experience of traffic on the A327 not stopping at those lights, so much as with the new Relief Road where the footpath is being put on a bridge, an alternative to a road level crossing needs to be considered.

The other talking point locally is the very visible campaign by Barkham Parish Council petitioning against the Barkham Square development, which can be found here. What the council is actually petitioning for is to force a discussion in council over “unsustainable development in Barkham”. But that is all the petition is for – Wokingham Borough Council can quite happily have the discussion, and then do absolutely nothing. It’s worth highlighting that the same arguments about sustainability are being made by the campaigns against the other locations being talked about for the next phase of housing, which are development on green belt land around Twyford and Ruscombe, and the 10,000 home development on rural Grazeley near junction 11 of the M4. As we have said previously, Barkham Square is the least controversial site under discussion, as it is an expansion of the existing Arborfield Green development, but early enough that the schools and district centre can be build for 4,500 homes rather than the planned 3,500. The main argument against it is that it will bring the Arborfield Green boundary very close to Barkham Village, and this is a separate settlement from Arborfield Green, but Barkham have rather neutered their own argument by having now moved their parish council offices out of Barkham Village into Arborfield Green, and very prominently argued that the 1,800 houses of the 3,500 on Arborfield Green being built in Barkham are part of Barkham through school naming arguments, arguments over the name of Arborfield Green as a whole, and the new very obvious big green signs marking the boundary of Barkham.

Unfortunately, being realistic it is almost inevitable that we will get more houses around Arborfield Green. The pressure for houses is coming from Westminster, not Wokingham. The council uses two basic criteria for establishing development locations, firstly brownfield sites, which was the basis on which Arborfield Garrison was selected as the largest development last time around, or secondly expanding existing settlements which was the basis of the Wokingham North and South strategic development locations, and the South of M4 location. Arborfield Green now has become an established development that can be expanded, and is especially attractive because it will have a modern district centre, has a big secondary school and two large primary schools being built already, so it would need less infrastructure than a totally new development.

The national housing policy is for significant new housing development in growth areas like Wokingham Borough, so the houses have to be built somewhere. If the council refuses all developments the Westminster Government will approve them anyway, but without consultation with residents or much council involvement at all. The Barkham campaign has already been labelled as NIMBYism by other parts of the borough, and to some extent the borough council trades off small campaigns from each particular area campaigning against each other, Grazeley residents are as passionate about their rural village as are Barkham, and Ruscombe residents are as passionate about preserving their village as are Barkham too. Really what we as a borough residents need to do is stop arguing against each other with leaflets like the Barkham one which says houses can be built in “other places”, and sit down and be realistic as a borough and answer the question – the government says we need to build these houses, where are we going to put them?

As we did at Arborfield Green, if the houses are going to come anyway, the questions we as a community need to be asking are not how do we stop all housing development here as that is unrealistic, but what do we as a community need in place to allow us to support the housing we are being asked to take. Do they need to provide a Medical Centre to support the extra houses? Do our schools have enough places? Do we need more road improvements? Is there enough green space?

Whatever happens in Arborfield tomorrow, we will still have the same Conservative administration in power, and their plans for the next phase of borough housing development which were revealed previously will continue to move forward as they have been behind the scenes during the election campaign.

Although the potential 15,000 houses at Grazeley and the development on the edge of the green belt around Twyford have attracted attention, the Arborfield Garrison SDL creep towards Barkham village on the Barkham Square will have the biggest impact for those of us in Arborfield.

Particular points to bear in mind is that the site in Barkham could take up to 1000 additional houses over and above the 3500 already planned for Arborfield Green. It’s also worth remembering that the route for all these new residents is likely to be straight out onto Langley Common Road, so most people going to Reading will more than likely be straight up School Road and down the Reading Road rather than driving in the wrong direction to get onto the bottom of the bypass which is very much positioned for traffic coming out of Arborfield Green via Nine Mile Ride Extension which won’t go anywhere near Barkham Square.

Our current councillor has already been involved in discussions over Barkham Square and has explicitly listed the SDL creep development as something he is opposing. The Labour candidate has said nothing about anything, and our Conservative candidate is opposing housing development in Arborfield but has been conspicuously not referring to the Barkham Square development which is potentially ten times the size of the one he actually opposed.

The next stage of plans will be up for consultation later in the year. Whoever we have as our councillor it will be important we as local residents have our say.

You may have noticed if you read the big Conservative advertisement feature on the outside of last weeks Wokingham Paper that among their list of achievements they list a swimming pool at Arborfield. Now whilst we have lakes and ponds on the new development we weren’t aware of a pool.

The Council Executive voted unanimously to build a pool in 2014 so even if it hasn’t been built quite yet, maybe we can find out where it will be.

First stop the operators of the newly opened Arborfield Green Leisure Centre – not anything on their website, nothing about a great new swimming pool.

Maybe it’s going somewhere else? Let’s check out the District Centre consultation, surely Crest would be trumpeting a swimming pool. No, not anything there either.

Maybe they’re being ironic and by Arborfield Pool they mean one of the large potholes that are littering the roads around the village?

Or maybe the big hole they’re currently digging at the corner of Sheerlands Road and Baird Road is what they think is the Arborfield Pool?

Suffice to say, four years after they agreed it, the only place Arborfield Pool seems to exist is in the Wokingham Conservatives list of achievements.

The Arborfield Medical Centre has become a topic of conversation again, so for those new to the area, a recap of the whole story is probably worthwhile.

The whole Arborfield Medical Centre saga goes right back to the planning stages for the currently building strategic development locations. As with what is now Bohunt Secondary School for school places, in the initial stages it was worked out that with the building of over 13,000 houses in the borough it was thought probable that a new medical practice would be needed, and that as the largest of the SDLs it made sense for that to be put at Arborfield, and the then Berkshire West Primary Care Trust in principle agreed.

Roll on to 2013 and as the results of the Conservative governments controversial NHS reorganisation were pushed through, Berkshire West Primary Care Trust was abolished and Arborfield came under the newly formed Wokingham Clinical Commissioning Group who had rather different ideas. Essentially our Clinical Commissioning Group, like others across the country was being pushed to introduce efficiency savings, and one effective way to do that is to move towards a smaller number of larger medical centres. As a result they calculated that by expanding the Wokingham and Woosehill GP practices they could meet the increased demand of the two Wokingham Strategic Development Locations, and meet Arborfield and South of M4 by expanding Shinfield, Swallowfield and Finchampstead GP practices. Anyone who is with Finchampstead Surgery will be well aware of the significant work that has gone on at the surgery over the past couple of years to expand the facilities, and the merger with and closure of the much smaller Cedar House GP surgery that used to be on Nine Mile Ride.

Needless to say this went down like the proverbial lead balloon with residents in Arborfield. We were told at a Community Forum, when the representative of the CCG gave us the news and swiftly left without answering questions. Their position was reiterated at the Health Overview and Scrutiny Committee last year which confirmed that the CCG had calculated that there was capacity for an additional 22,900 patients between Shinfield, Swallowfield and Finchampstead, and again at the meeting of the Wokingham CCG Governing Board where it was stated that a new facility at Arborfield Garrison would not be viable. The minutes of both meetings are available using those links.

That’s not to say that the developers are ignoring health requirements, indeed if you look at the exhibition boards for the district centre consultation that took place a little while ago, the community zone does explicitly include health facilities. The question of course is what will be there – health facilities could describe a variety of options.

The local Clinical Commissioning Group is independent of the borough council, indeed following a four way merger our group now extends way beyond the boundaries of Wokingham. Wokingham Borough can require developers to provide space for health care, but ultimately they can’t force the CCG to provide anything there.

So what might happen? In much the same way as we already have an Arborfield Surgery as a satellite from the Swallowfield practice, there is nothing to stop either Swallowfield or Finchampstead providing a similar facility in the community facilities in the new district centre. This may well be what our candidates are suggesting.

The basic facts however are this, whatever the local politicians are saying, whoever they meet with, or write to, all they can do is put pressure on the CCG to think again, they can’t force them to create a new practice here, all they can do is provide space in the plan, and this is what has already happened. The CCG however have been clear and consistent that they see the future of healthcare in our area being based on larger practices able to offer a more comprehensive range of services, and that a new practice here is not viable.

Short of somebody finding a magic money tree, or a significant number of extra houses being built locally to push the local practices over the threshold, it seems unlikely the CCG is going to change their decision.

It’s that time of year again, borough election day is Thursday 3rd May.

As usual only a third of Wokingham Borough Council is being re-elected on a four year term so in particular for one seat wards like Arborfield, this is an important vote for how you want to be represented until 2022. Key issues that will be addressed over that period are that by 2022 a lot more of the Arborfield Garrison SDL will be built out, but more importantly the council will have to determine where the tens of thousands of more houses the borough is planning to build after the current strategic development locations are completed will go – Grazeley, Barkham Square, Hall Farm?

This election in Arborfield is also a bit different.

For the last few elections, although we’ve had the odd candidate from UKIP or Labour, the election in Arborfield has always been a straight fight between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats. Steve Bacon, a long time Arborfield resident had been our Liberal Democrat councillor, but in 1997 narrowly lost to Gary Cowan, another Arborfield resident standing for the Conservatives in part over a Liberal Democrat plan to create a strategic development location at Grazeley. The Conservatives were elected across the borough on a promise to minimise house building, and most significantly they canned the Grazeley plan, John Redwood our MP even planted a tree in Grazeley promising the area would be preserved.

Roll forward to November 2016, and Gary was the first of a number of long standing councillors to quit the Conservatives, after revealing that the Conservative group had in secret been planning a significant new development of 15,000 houses at Grazeley – almost ten times the numbers proposed by the Liberal Democrats twenty years earlier. As highlighted in the press coverage at the time, after disagreeing over Grazeley, Gary was initially just deselected as Conservative candidate for Arborfield, and would have been allowed to serve the remainder of his term as a Conservative councillor on the understanding he wouldn’t run this time, he instead chose to resign, and has been an independent ever since.

It’s fair to say that Gary has always been pretty independent even before he resigned, most notably was a heated council meeting which many local residents attended and will remember when the Arborfield Garrison SDL was finally adopted. At that point Gary was a member of the Executive, and the meeting was actually stopped for a period when Gary said that he couldn’t vote for the plan because the concerns of Arborfield residents had not been properly taken on board. After stopping the meeting the entire executive disappeared into a side room, and came back with Gary looking ashen faced. When the meeting was restarted Gary still didn’t vote in favour, and lost his executive role and was sent to the back benches shortly afterwards. He also backed local residents over the routing of the Arborfield Relief Road when Wokingham Borough wanted a cheaper route that ran directly behind Chamberlain Gardens and sliced through Lockey Farm, and continues to fight for the medical centre on Arborfield Green that was dropped by the local clinical commissioning group.

This highlights one of the difficulties of being a local councillor backed by a political party, you serve two masters. On the one hand you are answerable to your electorate, to the people of your ward, on the other you are answerable to your party. The difficulty comes when your political party is asking you to do something that is not in the best interests of your residents.

Currently one of the main ways that Wokingham Borough Council is financing new infrastructure like roads and schools is by building houses, each new house built brings in extra money. Agreeing to take a development like Grazeley brings in even more money, as by taking those houses the council gets extra money from the government. Whilst most local residents understand that there needs to be some building, equally most of the existing residents moved to places like Arborfield because they are villages, and want proportionate development that retains the character of the communities. With Arborfield we currently have the largest strategic development location in the borough, and it’s no secret that the new infrastructure being built here can easily accommodate many more houses close by.

If you take a look at the map of areas under consideration for new housing in our part of the borough, Grazeley is obvious, but less talked about is the significant areas of land around Arborfield. At the most recent Community Forum Crest were already including Barkham Square as an area they’d secured for development, and the council is already in early planning consultation for what infrastructure will be needed. Barkham Square was highlighted in the press last autumn, and again here. There are also significant areas, some of which are already getting planning applications put forward around the south side of Arborfield Cross either side of School Road and around to the A327 and beyond that would fill the gap between Arborfield Cross and Arborfield Green. However the biggest area by far is around Arborfield itself which is Hall Farm, the land owned by the University. This site extends as far as Sindlesham and the M4 in the north and the A327 in the south. It’s certainly not on the table in the same way as Barkham Square is, but the University has made significant money over the last few years selling land around Shinfield for housing for the South of M4 SDL, and Hall Farm would represent a significant amount of additional money should it be developed.

So that brings us to the election. This time we have three candidates, Gary Cowan is standing as an independent, the Conservatives have nominated David Edmonds, and Chris Everett is standing for the Labour Party. There is no Liberal Democrat candidate this time, with the leader of Wokingham Liberal Democrats backing Gary instead. Of the three Gary is the only one who actually lives in Arborfield. David Edmonds is a long time resident of Riseley, and Chris Everett lives in Wokingham.

A Labour party candidate in Arborfield is comparatively rare. Chris Everett has been an active campaigner for Labour across the borough and has run for the council before, for example he ran as the Labour party candidate in the Emmbrook by-election last year getting 79 votes. As yet we really haven’t heard anything from Chris around here and it certainly seems likely he is a paper candidate.

Moving on to David Edmonds, if you’re on local social media you’ll certainly have noticed him, and he has been active leafleting around the ward, sharing how great it is in Arborfield, and what great facilities we have thanks to the Conservatives – so great he lives in Riseley…

It’s safe to say that the Conservatives desperately want to win Arborfield back. Given what happened with Gary, they’re obviously wanting a party loyalist – David is treasurer of Wokingham Conservatives. He also runs his own accountancy firm, which is coincidentally based in Grazeley, skills that he highlighted in early campaign material would be beneficial in helping the council use their limited resources wisely. Unlike the Labour candidate he has been trying to be seen to engage with local concerns. So he is apparently against the gravel extraction on Farley Farms – although he didn’t object at the time. He’s also against the new housing developments on School Road, although it wasn’t until it was pointed out that he hadn’t objected to those either, that on the last day of objections he actually put in two objections to the developments, and his wife duly highlighted the fact on social media. He is also apparently fighting for a new medical centre in Arborfield, although once again he only has taken an interest in the run up to the election.

These of course are clearly not much more than the usual publicity stunts for the period of higher scrutiny in the run up to the election. Before either David or Chris were selected you won’t have seen them involved in village life, or attending the Arborfield Community Forums. You won’t have seen them on the local social media, nor seen letters from them in the local paper, or writing in the Arborfield News. Indeed even after having been selected neither of them bothered to show up to the annual Arborfield Parish Meeting a few weeks back to take the opportunity to meet local electors. For local Conservatives, Arborfield has always been considered a safe seat, a shoe in to get a useful pair of hands like David Edmonds and his financial expertise onto the council. The complication for them is that independent to the last, Gary hasn’t done what the Conservatives wanted and stood aside as they told him to.

So that brings us on to Gary. If you look at the other Conservative councillors who left the party at around the same time as he did in 2016, one switched to the Liberal Democrats, and the other resigned altogether, only Gary continued to serve out the remainder of his term as an independent. Independents have historically had difficulty getting elected in Wokingham, but we were glad to find him putting his hat into the ring again this time to continue to serve Arborfield. Gary we’re sure will highlight his long record of successes over the years he has served Arborfield. Prior to resigning the party whip Gary would be limited by the party in what he could say, but having resigned he has been active in putting forward the views of Arborfield residents in council and attending relevant meetings such as the many community forums and planning meetings. Other councillors refer to him as “Mr Arborfield”, and if the primary role of a local councillor is to consistently represent his constituents, he has done that admirably.

Certainly whatever May 3rd brings, we will always be grateful for the support he has shown our group over the years in order to ensure that the concerns of Arborfield residents were highlighted as we accommodated the biggest strategic development location in the borough. We have no idea what went on in that side room when the SDL was adopted, but Gary showed on that night and since then that he’d put Arborfield over party orders, and ultimately the party paid him back by trying to force him out. We also can’t fail to acknowledge his integrity in going against party orders over the resurrection of Grazeley because he’d stood on a ticket of no housing at Grazeley when he was first elected.

So there you have it, on May 3rd will you pick candidate number one, Gary Cowan, described by many of his fellow councillors as “Mr Arborfield”. Candidate number two David Edmonds, the social media savvy accountant from Riseley, who thinks Arborfield is great, but just doesn’t want to live here, and just happens to be Wokingham Conservatives treasurer. Or will you pick candidate number three, Chris Everett, the Labour Party activist from Wokingham who nobody has seen and who is hoping that Arborfield will give him more than 79 votes.

The decision is yours.