From the Leader: A Big Day for the Local Plan

Last Friday, Wokingham Borough Council submitted its new Local Plan for inspector’s examination, a vital stage in the journey towards its use in determining planning applications.

A Local Plan is required by government to manage the process of development; it protects the borough against speculative and inappropriate new building and provides a planned approach to delivering the new housing numbers required by central government.  A new Local Plan is also needed if infrastructure is to be provided at the level required to support new development.

All Local Plans involve difficult choices.  I understand why people living near development sites may feel unhappy.  But the council has a duty to protect the borough from unplanned and speculative development and we can do that only by having an up-to-date Local Plan that identifies enough sites to meet the government’s housing allocation. 

As many of you know, the new government has revised the planning rules, and allocated Wokingham a higher housing number – 1,336 rather than 748 new dwellings a year.   

But in recognition of the need to avoid derailing work on Plans near to submission for examination, ministers have allowed councils at an advanced stage with their Local Plan to proceed under the old rules, and the lower housing allocations, rather than be forced to start again under the new rules and higher allocations – but only if they submit their Plans for inspector’s examination no later than the middle of March.

The timing of the submission of our new Plan is therefore very important and our planning team is to be congratulated for getting the considerable amount of work done to have the Plan ready in advance of the government’s mid-March deadline.  

The new Local Plan is based on the sites included in the draft Local Plan, drawn up under the previous (Conservative) administration, reinforced by further assessment and evidence gathering.  

Site selection (in the draft and in the final version) was based on three considerations alone: site availability – sites promoted to us by landowners and developers; site suitability – sites that comply with local and national planning policies; and site deliverability – sites that can deliver the required housing in the plan period. 

While the new Local Plan owes much to the draft Local Plan, it has some important new policy features, such as higher targets for much-needed Affordable Housing and cutting-edge energy efficiency and environmental standards that we will be requiring developers to meet in new homes.

The new Local Plan is not just about housing delivery.  It enables the council to negotiate key infrastructure to mitigate the impact of development, such as highways improvements, flood management measures, new schools, and a new country park.

It also sets out ways to preserve the borough from inappropriate development.  It includes significant new areas of valued landscape in the countryside and sites of urban landscape importance, in which any development will be limited.  And it designates over a hundred Local Green Spaces, which have a level of protection the same as the Green Belt in open countryside.

I thank all those involved in preparing this new Local Plan, especially our planning officers, but also my predecessors as executive members for Planning and the Local Plan, Lindsay Ferris in the current administration, and Wayne Smith in the previous (Conservative) one.  

Sadly, the Conservatives, now in opposition and freed from the need to behave responsibly, have decided that it’s politically convenient to attack the very Plan that Wayne played such an important part in putting together.