Hall Farm homes plan ‘dovetails nicely’ says council leader
PROPOSALS for 4,500 homes at Hall Farm in Shinfield could become a reality if the new Draft Local Plan is adopted.
Tomorrow night, Wokingham Borough Council’s ruling executive committee will be asked to approve the public consultation on the second stage of the new plan, outlining where housing could go across the borough in future years.
Cllr John Halsall said that Hall Farm was being put forward “for a variety of cogent reasons, and it dovetails nicely with the investment we’re putting into jobs in that area”.
He added that developers would be required to put in appropriate infrastructure, if it goes ahead.
The Draft Local Plan would also help protect the borough from speculate developments.
“The vast majority of our borough is not protected land (such as green belt), therefore speculative development would increase the amount of housing that goes into the borough hugely,” he said. “By publishing a local plan and getting it accepted, that number is minimised.”
He added: “I think what we’re putting forward for consultation is a good compromise for all of the borough.
“We’ve tried to put housing sympathetically in the areas which have been promoted (as suitable for development) and are possible.”
One aspect of the new local plan is trying to allocate more than 70 areas as green spaces, which would help protect them from future projects.
“One of the benefits of development is that you can create green space which is accessible to the public,” Cllr Halsall said.
Hall Farm is, he said, “a very different development from that which was envisaged in Grazeley”, and would be “a bit more Wokingham than Grazeley would have been”.
He also hoped that the council would be able to encourage developers to make homes greener, and hoped that the Government would make it easier for homes to be greener in future.
“Our climate emergency is really based upon us doing as much as we possible can to achieve the goal of carbon neutrality by 2030,” he said. “We will never achieve it on our own.
“Current building guidance doesn’t encompass everything that we were hoping to do.
“After COP26, it should be easier to introduce those ideas into new bills. I’m pressing minsters very hard to go down that track.”
Cllr Halsall felt that another important reason for having the local plan in place was because Wokingham was a popular place for people to live.
“Pretty much all the housing is sold before it’s built,” he said. “We have people eager to come and work here.
“Building homes means meeting those needs.
“We have tried in our planning to ensure the right homes are built in the right places. We can’t micromanage developers, but we can influence what they build.”
Alongside this, he said, runs the council’s strategy to build more social and affordable housing.
The overarching desire with the local plan is, Cllr Halsall said, to keep residents at the forefront of everything.
“The only reason we’re here is to serve our residents, so this is a local plan that should enrich lives, protect our local and valued environments,” he said.
“We are getting better at conserving the countryside, playing a key role in maintaining biodiversity.
“We want the borough to feel like a healthier place because it will be a healthier place.”
Friday’s extraordinary executive meeting, which will be broadcast live on the council’s YouTube channel, was being held because the council wanted to get the consultation up and running as quickly as possible.
“The supporting documents have to be current,” Cllr Halsall said. “We had always envisaged that as soon as the work was done, we would have a special executive meeting, dedicated to one topic, a topic of extreme importance to the entire borough. We do the same for the budget.”