You may have already seen the new banners - NOT A DONE DEAL - displayed in Shinfield and Lower Earley near Meldreth Way, expressing our opposition to yet more houses swamping our area.
There is now hope that the 4,500 homes for the proposed Loddon Garden Village and Barkham Square in Wokingham’s Local Plan Update will not go ahead. The Planning Inspectorate has expressed serious concerns– including costing for a motorway bridge, a sewage treatment facility as well as the Council’s ability to deliver homes in a timely manner.
UPDATE: Wokingham Borough Council have requested a further 2-weeks to address the concerns highlighted by the Planning Inspectorate beyond the original deadline. That extended deadline has now expired. We await developments. Look out for the Council's response here:
https://www.localplanservices.co.uk/wokinghamlpexamination
An initial hearing is expected in Council in early July (date to be confirmed) lasting up to one week with the main public examination likely to be in the Autumn 2025. When we know the exact dates you will be urged/invited to attend. Visible public opposition at this stage is vital!
F.Y.I. The Planning Inspectorate have in recent years rejected 4 out of 6 proposed ‘Garden Villages’ around the country, so all is not lost.
HOW CAN YOU HELP?
Look out for our News page online The Campaign for Fairer Housing Team
26 May 2025
On 28 February, WBC sent a cover letter with their Local Plan submission documents. The letter said they considered the main issues for the examination to be:
‘• The housing site allocations, including deliverability and timing of projected
housing delivery, particularly from strategic sites;
• The proposed plan period;
• The proposed approach to climate change and energy;
• The approach to affordable housing, including the thresholds proposed;
• The identification of local valued landscapes.’
We can see WBC flagged up ‘deliverability and timing of projected housing delivery’ as the first of the issues they expected to be examined at the EIP. Yet two-and-a-half months later, after the Inspectors wrote to them in April with questions on precisely that topic (see our previous News Page item), the Council were reduced to begging for more time, saying:
‘Further to your letter dated April 2025, received on 17 April, which set out initial questions and requests for further information and clarity, the council has been working to provide a response by 14 May as requested. … Whilst the council began to work towards providing a full response by the requested date, this has proven not to be achievable, with both professional and leave commitments for key officers and consultants being especially difficult. The provision of a full response which will assist the examination will require an additional two weeks’ (WBC letter to Planning Inspectors, 12 May 2025)
This strikes me as preparing for an oral exam, say for a foreign language or professional quali-fication, by first submitting a topic you expect to talk about. But then saying you aren’t ready to discuss it yet.
Not very credible, when deliverability and timing problems with the LPU have been raised again and again in public consultations over the last three years. You’d think the Council officials would by now have worked how they were going to respond, and would have their story ready in good order. Apparently not.
Now we’re expecting the Shute End planners to reply to the Inspectors by Wednesday 28th May. How well they’ve used the two weeks’ grace they were given remains to be seen.
Richard Ingham
2.30 p.m. Saturday 17 May 2025
School Green Centre, Shinfield
Hall Farm is NOT a done deal
Planning inspectors have rejected several ‘garden village' plans in recent years:
Planning Resource 28 May 2020
‘A planning inspector vetoed two garden community proposals totalling 34,000
new homes in an [Essex] local plan because he considered them to be neither
viable nor deliverable.’
Kent Live 29 March 2022
‘A planning inspector has dismissed a controversial plan for hundreds of homes
in open countryside. FD Attwood and Partners has long been trying to develop
land at Gibraltar Farm in Capstone Valley, Chatham.’
Surrey Live 24 August 2023
‘A district council must go back to the drawing board on its plan for 6,000 homes
in the area more than four years after it was submitted to central government.
Inspector Philip Lewis told Tandridge District Council he thought its local plan
could not be made "sound", due to particular concerns around its proposed
4,000-home garden village in South Godstone.’
Kent Online 18 December 2023
‘Tunbridge Wells Borough Council had initially included a garden village at
Tudeley … as part of its Local Plan Review. But its draft plan was thrown back at
it in November last year by a government planning inspector, who said he was not
convinced about the evidence submitted to support the garden village.’
Will Hall Farm be next?
Planning Resource 30 April 2025
‘Inspectors have raised “particular concerns” about the proposed delivery of
housing in an authority’s submitted local plan, including in relation to a 3,930-
home garden village allocation that would account for more than 20 per cent of
the plan’s total homes provision.’
Yes, the authority is Wokingham Borough Council.
But we’re not complacent. This is only the Inspectors’ initial response, and all is still to play for. Our campaign goes on, standing with the hundreds of residents from the South of the Borough who have objected to the Hall Farm project. We reject the unfair allocation of most new housing to our areas, by local politicians out for votes in the areas they protect.
We’ll be listening to representatives of other local campaigns, to learn what has worked for them.
Come and hear how other campaigns have fought excessive housing development.
You'll be able to ask questions, and discuss ideas you may have about how to resist inappropriate housing.
The better informed we all are, the more effective we’ll be if we’re planning to speak at the Inspectors’ Examination of the local plan. And the less impressed we’ll be by the developers and their smooth-talking spiel.
Contact us on:-
https://www.campaign-for-fairer-housing.co.uk/contact-us/
Richard Ingham
Big news on Wokingham’s Local Plan!
Barely six weeks after they received WBC’s Local Plan Update, the Planning Inspectors have fired back eight pages of detailed questions - querying the Hall Farm site development in particular. So concerned are the Inspectors that they suggest holding ‘early hearings in relation to these matters’.
Their questions target key assumptions that WBC has made, but failed to spell out properly. They involve lack of timescales for housebuilding, and inconsistency and vagueness on infrastructure costs.
The Inspectors want to know how the council thinks the first dwellings are going to be delivered already in financial year 2026/27, when several important milestones would need to be achieved first. They then ask what assumptions are made, and on what evidence, in relation to annual delivery rates for housing on the site over the whole course of the plan. They invite the council to tell them how these would compare with lead-in times and annual delivery rates it achieved on large sites in its previous Local Plan. (They must be aware how much slippage there was, and indeed usually is with housing delivery rates on large sites.)
The Inspectors note that the Council’s Infrastructure Delivery Plan (IDP) calls for five major items, including an M4 bridge, and upgrades to the Arborfield sewerage substation. They want to know what delivery timescales are envisaged for each item, and how those relate to the timescales for dwelling occupancy.
The Inspectors find even more glaring flaws in the Council’s costings. They ask why the costs proposed for the infrastructure requirements in the Local Plan Viability Study for the site differ significantly from those in the IDP for the same items. They also query why the Local Plan Viability Study excludes major items of infrastructure listed for the Hall Harm site in the IDP. These include upgrades to sewerage, highway works and community facilities. They want to know whether these infrastructural costs, totalling over £180 million, have been considered in the Viability Study. Where costings are provided, they note, it is not even clear what these are based on, whether on current prices or not.
The document has page after page of sharp challenges to many other aspects of the Local Plan, which there's no space to consider here.
It's really quite embarrassing for the Borough that our local planning officers seem to have done such an unsatisfactory job, with so many fairly obvious issues not properly dealt with. They had four years to get this document into shape, and two rounds of consultation during that time have brought up many of those same questions. To no avail, apparently.
And this is just the inspectors' initial response, based on what they've read so far, they say. It's not the full report.
You can read the document here:
https://www.localplanservices.co.uk/_files/ugd/017f5b_bf3e31059d5b4eb6a0e9033f42a7230e.pdf
Richard Ingham
Official Bodies say No to WBC Local Plan
Richard Ingham 27th March 2025
WBC’s Local Plan has run into a massive headwind of opposition from influential official bodies and other associations. Their responses to the Reg 19 consultation make it clear how much the Council would have to do before the Plan could be considered sound. This news item summarises the main objections found in their submissions.
Waste water treatment upgrade needed - Environment Agency
The Environment Agency expresses some concerns about flooding and mitigation of the flood risk posed by the proposed Hall Farm development. Its major concern, though, is that waste water treatment infrastructure in the Borough would be unable to cope with the greatly increased population envisaged. The Environment Agency states that it will not approve any large-scale planning applications until significant upgrades are in place at Arborfield and Wargrave Sewage Treatment Works.
Ashridge wants to be added
The Ashridge Consortium’s submission, prepared by the consultants Boyer, offers a powerful critique of the WBC local plan at several levels.
It dismisses the often-heard criticism of the Ashridge plan that not all of the landowners there are signed up to the Consortium’s development proposal, whereas the Hall Farm land owners are all on board with the ‘Loddon Valley Garden Village’ plan. It says on the contrary that the Ashridge landowners are all signed up to their consortium, while the Hall Farm landowners have yet to get to that stage.
Other points made by the submission are:- WBC fails to meet the requirement to cooperate with neighbouring councils, by not allowing for Reading Borough Council’s unmet housing need; furthermore, the Plan’s commencement date has been incorrectly calculated as 2023/24, whereas the Standard Method for calculating housing need uses 2024/25 figures. Planning regulations apparently require the two time-points to be the same.
The houses won't be built in time.
The Boyer submission’s most telling points are directed at the feasibility of building a SDL at Hall Farm. It shows in detail why the timescale for delivery of new housing is far too optimistic, bearing in mind the large amount of initial infrastructure provision that would be required before any houses could be built. (Not to mention the time required by statute to survey the entire Hall Farm site for gravel and remove it.) The process of the Inspectors’ examination of the Local Plan alone is likely to last a year, before anything else can happen, but WBC does not acknowledge as much.
What all this means, the Ashridge consortium says, is that the Hall Farm plan is critically exposed to lengthy delays that would endanger the Borough Council’s housing supply requirement.
There is a far less attractive part of their submission. Boyer does not say that the Hall Farm development plan should be taken out and replaced by development at Ashridge. It argues for adding Ashridge to the Local Plan. From our point of view, that would be a very unwelcome outcome. At least, however, the Ashridge consortium’s incisive arguments should make it clear to Inspectors that approving the so-called London Valley Garden village proposal would be the wrong decision.
Parish councils say no
Unrealistic infrastructure costs - Arborfield & Newland P.C.
The two parish councils most directly affected by the Hall Farm scheme are strongly opposed to it. Arborfield Council has submitted a well-argued report by consultants Bell Cornwell, which makes a number of excellent objections.
Especially as regards Hall Farm, it calls the Local Plan unrealistic in terms of infrastructure costs - which are moreover not fully considered by the externally conducted ‘viability study’! It also calls out the ‘minimal detail’ provided by WBC on timing of infrastructure delivery. The submission notes that the traffic model is clearly out of date.
In addition, Arborfield Parish Council draw attention to WBC’s bad track record on ensuring infrastructure provision to the previous SDLs, resulting in an 8-to-9 year lag before it materialises. This points to the risk, they say, that the developers would fail to provide infrastructure in timely fashion, not least with the M4 Bridge. If the latter were to be significantly delayed, perhaps beyond the plan period, there would be very serious consequences for traffic flows until that time.
As regards the flood risk, Bell Cornwell’s submission observes that developers are required only to ‘consider and take the opportunity as appropriate’ to provide offsite flood mitigation. They are not explicitly required to implement them. So areas upstream and downstream of the Hall Farm site could suffer flooding as a result of water run-off from all the new housing, without the developers being obliged to mitigate against this possibility.
Doesn’t respect NPPF - Shinfield P.C.
Shinfield Parish Council's submission finds the LPU violates the 2023 National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF), in various respects:- By ignoring more sustainable sites, it doesn't achieve sustainable development; it doesn't ‘promote healthy and safe communities’; it doesn't promote sustainable transport; it doesn't ‘meet the challenge of climate change and flooding’. In particular, the Parish Council notes that Shinfield's communities are not offered ‘a choice of secondary schools’ as would be required by the NPPF. In addition, the focus on development at Hall Farm places housing far from active travel infrastructure. The LPU does not ‘make as much use as possible of brownfield land’, as required by the NPPF. Development at Hall farm would significantly increase flood risk from water run-off.
The Shinfield Parish Council submission is very effectively presented: it directly compares the LPU with quoted NPPF requirements, and shows how it is in clear contradiction with them.
‘Active travel’ not well addressed - Reading Borough Council
Reading Borough Council’s submission says it ‘cannot support the plans for Loddon Valley Garden Village as it [sic] stands’. It goes on:
‘RBC’s main concerns relate to transport. In particular we have not been provided with information to clearly demonstrate that a development on this scale can and will be highly accessible by public transport, walking and cycling to services, facilities and the rest of the transport network, including links into central Reading. We do not agree that active travel and public transport have been adequately addressed within the Proposed Submission Plan with regard to Loddon Valley Garden Village.
The proposal of a new bridge ending at Lower Earley Way that is open to all traffic will encourage bus travel, but will certainly also encourage car travel to Reading via Lower Early [sic] using congested and unsuitable roads. Bus routes in Lower Earley are already experiencing considerable delays and increasing traffic in this area will make bus journeys longer, less attractive and less reliable.’
RBC exposes the Wokingham Council ‘active travel’ narrative for the hollow sham that it is. For all the pious statements about encouraging cycling, public transport, and walking, the Hall Farm development would be a massive generator of extra vehicle traffic. RBC should know the true position - Wokingham Borough is critically dependent for public transport on Reading Buses. When Reading says its bus services would be badly affected by the Hall Farm plan, we’d better believe it.
NB: The Ashridge consortium claims that Reading will have an unmet housing quota in the coming plan period (see above), but RBC says it will not:
‘RBC does not consider that there is a need to make any additional allowance for unmet need from Reading in the Wokingham Local Plan Update. The most up-to-date position is that RBC expects to deliver enough homes over the remainder of its adopted plan period (to 2036) to more than meet its own adopted housing provision plus any unmet need within its own boundaries.’
The above is an inevitably selective summary of the many compelling objections raised by these and other official bodies and associations. Visitors to this site are encouraged to go to https://www.wokingham.gov.uk/planning-policy/emerging-local-plan-update/proposed-submission-regulation-19-consultation-responses, to read them in detail for themselves.
Altogether, they give the impression that the LPU cannot rationally be considered ‘sound’ by the Planning Inspectorate.
However, WBC has responded to these objections and in a future news item I will summarise how it seeks to deal with them.
Planning inspectors accept or reject a local growth plan according to criteria called ‘tests for soundness’. The plan must be: –
A) Positively prepared: it meets assessed needs and offers sustainable development
B) Justified: it is appropriate and takes into account reasonable alternatives
C) Effective: it is deliverable over the plan period
D) Consistent with national planning policy
Our objections
We have objected to the Hall Farm section of the Local Plan update (policy SS 13), saying it is unsound because:
- it does not sufficiently consider the effect on habitats
- it does not clearly state mechanisms for ensuring adequate and timely infrastructure delivery
- it does not make provision for links to sufficient public transport capacity
- it does not adequately consider traffic movements and saturation effects at key road junctions that would be impacted
- it does not take proper account of increased clean water and sewerage requirements resulting from adding over 10,000 individuals to an already highly populated area
- it has rejected alternatives to Hall Farm on grounds that are not well-supported
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