We have today issued the following press release on the Wokingham Borough Council decision to cancel the next Community Forum, and not to hold another until after the planning application has been adopted.
As with any planning application, the responses to the outline planning application by the Arborfield Garrison Landowners Consortium earlier this year are a matter of public record, and any member of the public should they so wish can review them at the council offices, or online through the council website. However given that there are almost seven hundred responses, many handwritten, and they are arranged online in the order they were received, discerning any patterns or key issues is quite a task.
We are therefore grateful to the officers at Wokingham Borough Council for putting together a summary document, and in particular for allowing us to share it to a wider audience. The document was put together at the end of July and includes analysis for all responses received up to that point. The document is arranged by subjects and themes, so gives a good overview of what respondents were concerned about, and also highlights a couple of points where contradictory responses were received.
It is worth highlighting the overall figures – over 94% of the responses objected to the development, only 24 responses were fully in favour, and if you take a look at the actual responses you’ll find that some of those favourable responses came from the Arborfield Garrison HQ and personnel living on the Garrison.
This is the full summary document, once again our thanks to Matthew Mellville for allowing us to publish this online.
O20130600 Summary of Public Comments – June 2013 Consultation
Following on from the meeting at the FBC centre earlier in August a number of members of AG-RAG with children who will be coming up to secondary school age have been discussing the issues raised.
Firstly, the council still gave no guarantee of a school, what they said was:
If we look back, Wokingham Borough Council have been promising a new secondary school to residents of Finchampstead for over ten years, and have failed to deliver it. Over a number of years there has also been a shortage of primary school places which the council addressed by adding bulge classes to various local schools – new primary schools were only built this year.
In order to build a new school in 2017 in Arborfield the council has to both get enough money together, and the developers have to clear the site and provide it to the council in good time for a school to be built ready to open.
As a new build school the buildings will be subject to the governments new, lower cost standards for school buildings will be followed, and the rest of the Arborfield Garrison housing development will go on around the new school.
Putting those points aside, even before 2017 parents in the parishes south of Wokingham will have increasing difficulty getting their children into their chosen schools. The standard tie breaker when deciding on school places in the borough is by distance, and with no secondary school in the south, parents in the parishes of Finchampstead and Arborfield lose a lot of the time, as a result they get allocated spare places elsewhere in the borough in schools like Bulmershe, or they have to send their children over the border to schools in Hampshire. As the years go on, and free capacity in the secondary system reduces this is only going to get worse.
Looking at all of those points, to those members with children it seemed there was a lot of uncertainty in the council plan, and that even if they managed to build a school, a building site wouldn’t be the kind of location we would like to see our children educated. As such it seemed the only real option to get some certainty over what might happen was to explore the free school option.
The main advantages of a free school are firstly it would get access to money that wouldn’t usually be available if the council were to build a school. Secondly a free school has lower requirements to be allowed to be built – a free school only has to show a demand, not a need – i.e. there is a demand for a school in the southern parish, whereas the need for a school in the south would be established by looking at the availability of school spaces across the whole borough.
As a result we have made the first moves towards forming a committee to lead a free school bid. Currently there is a Facebook discussion group looking at the issues, and most importantly a petition running to establish the demand for a school in the southern parishes. Given that the proposed school site won’t be available until 2017 at the earliest, and building work around the site will be ongoing we are also exploring other sites that could accommodate the school so the children are not being educated on a building site – a suggestion that has been put forward several times for a local site that would be of the size needed, and would be available with relatively little adaptation is the current officers mess at West Court that is to be vacated and sold along with the rest of the Garrison. Any other suggestions would be most welcome.
So what do we need to do:
Firstly whilst parents around here know there is a demand we need to establish it so
Please be aware that signing the petition is in no way saying that you will send your children to the school, nor does it guarantee your child a place should the school be opened, it is only there to allow us to show the Department of Education that the demand for a school is there.
Secondly, if you feel you can offer more time to help shape the vision for the school, please volunteer using our contact page linked above. Whilst there are experts in the field who can help us, fundamentally this has to be a parent led project. Involvement in this stage of the process does not mean that you are making a long term commitment once the school has opened, however if the free school group so decides there is some possibility of a limited ability to allocate places at the school to founders children outside the normal admissions process.
We are currently setting up a separate web site for the free school group, along with discussion forums, and we will publish details of those once it is up and running.
In many places when talking about the traffic mitigation for Arborfield village the terms “Relief Road” and “Bypass” get used interchangeably.
In general the Wokingham Borough Council officers will make sure they use the term “Relief Road” whereas the councillors will use both terms but a lot of the time will correct themselves when they say “Bypass”.
The residents of Arborfield village have always asked for a “Bypass”.
Although the two terms are often mixed up, they mean distinctly different things. A “Relief Road” is intended to relieve a specific traffic problem or problems, whereas a “Bypass” bypasses an entire community, in terms of the various options put forward by Wokingham Borough Council, their favoured solution, A3 is a “Relief Road” because it is intended to relieve traffic on the congested A327 through the village and at the roundabout, but it isn’t a “Bypass” because traffic still passes through lower Arborfield, and it doesn’t provide any resolution to the problems of people living on that part of the Reading Road or those who live in Walden Avenue or Greensward Lane. Route B1 on the other hand is a “Bypass” because it also avoids lower Arborfield, and connects to the existing Arborfield Garrison bypass at the Langley Common Road/A327 roundabout.
As the Arborfield Garrison Residents Action Group we are primarily concerned with the development planned on the Arborfield Garrison site and adjacent land, and as part of that we continue to press the council to ensure adequate traffic mitigation is provided at all the local black spots such as Arborfield, but also including Barkham Bridge, California Crossroads and further down the A327 at Eversley, and that any mitigation should minimise the impact on surrounding communities in Arborfield, Barkham, Finchampstead, Eversley and Farley Hill. As such whilst we are clear that something needs to be provided at Arborfield, it is primarily something that the people who live in Arborfield itself need to decide. Suffice to say that the people of Arborfield village have been consistent in wanting a “Bypass” for all the known black spots, and the council should be honest in what they are presenting and not try to confuse residents into thinking that the “Relief Road” is what they have been asking for for all these years.
Residents of Arborfield village have formed their own action group specifically to campaign on the bypass and their website can be found at http://arborfield-action-group.org. We would urge any AG-RAG members with a particular interest in the routing of the bypass to get in contact and support their action group. Equally other members may be more affected by route B1, so it is vitally important that everybody participates in the consultation this autumn – remember the route is not a done deal!
It’s fair to say that for a number of people who attended the meeting tonight on the secondary school strategy, and in particular the proposed school as part of the Arborfield Garrison SDL, the meeting was rather a disappointment. Many people attended expecting to see some kind of definite plan for what is going to happen, but what was presented was very vague and fluffy.
However as both the councillors and officers tried to explain, thanks to the significant changes in schools policy brought in by the current education minister, Michael Gove, the locally elected councillors cannot now build the long promised school themselves, they can only enable the building of an academy school to be run by a third party education provider. As discussed at the meeting tonight under current estimates the council expects to run out of secondary school places for the 2017/2018 academic year, so their strategy is to ensure that new school places are created in time for that year. Their preferred solution is for a new academy school at Arborfield, built in the same way as they have done with the three primary schools built this year, but if that is not available they will negotiate for additional capacity at other schools.
If residents want new secondary school provision before that time, the clear message of the meeting is over to you! The only way to get a school opened prior to 2017 is to form a free school as parents did with the Oakbank school.
Other important points to take away from the meeting is that the council currently does not have the money to build the new school, council officers were talking about building a war chest to finance the school, but this is primarily dependent on getting section 106 money from housing developers across the borough. It was suggested at the meeting that the free school route would have greater access to funding as any potential free school would have direct access to central government funding for the free school programme.
In summary:
As a residents group it is clear to us that given the potentially limited money available via the council the best deal for the community, and the best way to shape the school to what the community requires would be via the free school route. But the fundamental thing needed for that is a group of local people with the time and energy to go through the complicated free school process, and the impression at the meeting is that currently we don’t have that, or do we?
If you were one of the 250 people who attended the recent Arborfield Community Forum meeting where Steve Bailey presented the preferred route for the Aborfield Relief Road, you probably took away from that that the next stage in the process was that the council was going to put the preferred route out for consultation to be refined in preparation for a formal adoption and a formal planning application next year. Indeed if you take a look back at the video and slides from the evening the slide headed Process indicates that the consultation is to “confirm or modify” the preferred scheme, the council only contacted the landowners affected by their preferred scheme not all the shortlist, and the proposal before the Council Executive tonight for the Arborfield Relief Road, and for the North Wokingham Distributor road was that the Executive “approve the recommended scheme for multi-level public consultation”.
However tonight after Cllr Keith Baker repeatedly told the Executive and the members of the public attending that all the proposed routes were to be put forward for consultation, and indeed when expressly challenged by Anthony Lewis, Cllr Baker explicitly stated that exhibition boards would show all the possible routes not just the technical recommendation, and subsequently to Cllr Gary Cowan that all landowners on all routes would be contacted. He also asserted that this had always been the intention. Council leader Cllr David Lee thankfully proposed a change to the proposal before the executive for both the Arborfield and North Wokingham roads to ensure that the Executive approved putting all routes out to consultation as Cllr Baker had repeatedly said was the intention.
Firstly we’d like to thank Cllr Lee for ensuring that the motion before the executive proposed consulting on all the considered routes. We’d also like to highlight that if, as Cllr Baker repeatedly said tonight the intention was always to consult on all the routes this wasn’t made very clear at the community forum meeting, certainly the majority of the people at the meeting including the Parish Council believed that only one route was going to be put out to consultation.
Looking at wider issues, the proposed route also raised concerns from the local councillor in Winnersh that the additional leg of the route across Lockey Farm would encourage increased traffic towards Winnersh Crossroads a significant issue given that the Winnersh relief road is currently stalled. Other information that came out at the meeting is that Hampshire County Council have apparently dropped their judicial review, although it also appears that they are also lacking the funds to be able to finance their part of any Eversley bypass. Whilst the Thames Valley Local Enterprise Partnership could still provide some funds for a wider A327 corridor scheme, it seems funding available through that avenue is also now less than previously expected.
For those members concerned about the proposals on Barkham Bridge and at California Crossroads, Cllr Stanton did highlight these as areas of concern during the Arborfield discussion.
We continue to highlight the importance of suitable traffic schemes in order to mitigate the significant effect of building 3,500 houses in a semi-rural area, with poor public transport and significant existing bottlenecks. As part of these we believe that an Arborfield Relief Road is necessary, as is a scheme to deal with the issues on Eversley Street, however it is important that those proposals meet the needs of not only the new residents within the SDL, but those in the villages of Arborfield and Eversley.
Thank you once again to all those people who put in questions to the Executive tonight, as both Cllr Baker and Cllr Lee highlighted they welcome participation from local residents in the consultations and through public questions at the Executive. We’d also like to thank Cllr Lee for rearranging the agenda to ensure that the large number of Arborfield residents who attended didn’t have to sit through the other discussions.
If you were listening to the Phil Kennedy Drive Time show on BBC Berkshire this afternoon you may well have heard our spokesperson Gill Purchase and Cllr Keith Baker talking to Phil about the proposal for the Arborfield Bypass and the opposition from villagers to the proposed route that comes very close to the Arborfield Cross, leaves extra traffic still driving through the middle of Arborfield and will put Lockey Farm out of business.
Keith’s responses are pretty dismissive, describing the suggestion that Lockey Farm would be put out of business as scaremongering – however as he admits, the council has yet to talk properly to the owners of Lockey Farm. From our position of having talked to the owners of Lockey Farm already before we made the point on the radio, the impact on Lockey Farm will be such that they will lose significant sources of income were the road to be built, and would be unable to continue in business. The farm obviously intends to speak for itself and we offer them our full support – the relief road is intended to benefit Arborfield, not destroy the livelihood of a well respected local business and employer.
You can hear the full interviews here:
We are also pleased to report that the Parish Council have issued a response to the bypass plan. They intend to consult the residents as a whole through the next Arborfield News to get a clear understanding of the view across the whole village. Their statement issued through the village website is as follows:
The Parish Council was not consulted on the analysis carried out by WBC and therefore does not at this point have a preferred option. We recognise any one of the routes will be both popular and unpopular with a proportion of residents but we also recognise that a bypass is required. Each Councillor is currently looking at the recommended route individually and will be highlighting their key concerns so we can collate an initial response to WBC although it is also recognised that the consultation does not commence until September. Our initial request to WBC, which has been made, is to be supplied with the supporting documents and analysis so we can see how they arrived at the recommended route. We are sure this will raise further questions and queries which will be worked on over the summer. The Parish Council plans to create a questionnaire for residents, information of which will be in the next issue of the Arborfield News and also available on Survey Monkey. By having the questionnaire responses we will be able to gauge local thought as not everyone wishes to stand up in a packed room to air their concerns and thoughts.
Lastly, don’t forget the executive meeting taking place tomorrow, Thursday 25th July, 7:30pm at the Wokingham Borough Council offices. We understand that a significant number of questions have been submitted, and whilst if the questioners do not attend those questions will be answered in writing, attending the meeting in person gives the opportunity to ask a supplementary question of the council executive. Even if you’re not asking a question, having a good turn out of residents is worthwhile, so if you can spare the time please join us tomorrow night.
As was mentioned in the meeting on Monday, the proposal in the presentation we saw this week goes before the Council Executive at the July Executive Meeting. This meeting is due to take place at on Thursday 25th July, at the council offices at Shute End in Wokingham. The time of the meeting will be confirmed on http://www.wokingham.gov.uk/council/meetings/minutes/ in the next day or two. This is not the adoption of this as the final proposal, but is the adoption of the proposal as a basis for the consultation in the autumn.
As with any meeting of the Executive there is an allocated time on the agenda for questions from members of the public. If the questioner is absent then whether the question is answered verbally or via a written response is at the discretion of Cllr David Lee who chairs the meeting, however for anybody who turns up in person the question will be answered and you are offered the opportunity to ask a supplementary question. All of the questions and answers will be recorded in full in the minutes of the meeting. As such it is an excellent opportunity to ask further questions about the relief road proposals and we would urge as many people as possible, especially if you feel your question was not adequately answered this week to make use of the opportunity and ask your question at this meeting. Asking a question is very straightfoward, and can be done through an online form at http://www.wokingham.gov.uk/council/meetings/questionhow/ and as the Arborfield Relief Road is an agenda item questions can be posted until 10am on 24th July. If you are planning to ask a question, or are going to attend the meeting, please let us know.
Whilst there was a very large number of attendees at the community forum yesterday, we are aware of a number of people who wanted to attend, but for various reasons were unable to.
However Wokingham Voice who up to now have been concentrating on the Wokingham SDL’s and the Wokingham Town Centre Regeneration came along to video record the Arborfield Forum, and have posted this video online. The video includes the full presentation on the 21 bypass route variations considered, and the councils preferred option, followed by all of the questions and answers put forward by the many residents in attendance.
Our thanks go to Kaz Lokuciewski for taking the time to come along to the forum and record it, and for getting the video online so quickly so that residents who were unable to attend can see the presentation.
A downloadable copy of the presentation is available below:
Arborfield Relief Road Technical Recommendation 15 July 2013
Our press release issued following the announcement is available below:
September 9th Community Forum CANCELLED
If you are on any of the various council mailing lists you will have already received notification of this, however just to confirm that Wokingham Borough Council have decided to cancel the next Arborfield Community Forum, and are not proposing to hold another forum until Thursday 12th December, more than three months later.
The justification for the cancellation is because the consultation on the Arborfield Cross Relief Road opens on September 9th.
As a group we are very disappointed by this decision. There are many other issues relating to the development that can and need to be discussed, and it is perfectly possible to continue the important community forum meetings whilst making it clear that the relief road cannot be discussed whilst the consultation is continuing. For example the notes from the previous forum meeting highlight schools, early years provision and issues over facilities for the service personnel remaining in Arborfield after the garrison closes as issues requiring further discussion, none of which have any bearing on the relief road consultation.
Additionally at the last full community forum Cllr David Lee highlighted the appointment of Crest Nicholson as Development Manager for the site and said that Crest Nicholson wanted to meet with residents shortly, talking about dates in late July. It’s now the end of August and that meeting hasn’t taken place, more than that the main forum for residents to discuss the development is being closed down leaving a gap of six months between forums.
Whilst the relief road consultation is important, and the announcement of the route not surprisingly produced a heated meeting, getting a good development at Arborfield Garrison is about more than building roads. It is therefore important that this valuable way of keeping communication between residents and interested parties and the council is kept going, and not cancelled for months at a time when a controversial issue is being consulted on. This group was formed in part because of a perceived lack of communication from Wokingham Borough Council with residents during earlier consultation stages, reducing communication now as we reach key stages of the process seems like a retrograde step and is very disappointing.
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