A plan for about 4,000 homes between Shinfield and Arborfield – the Loddon Valley Garden Village – is back centre-stage as planning inspectors return to Wokingham next week.
New hearings start on Tuesday, March 17 at 10am, and inspectors look set to approve the model for how Wokingham will grow in coming years. The big flashpoint is access to the Hall Farm site near Reading.
Opposition leader Pauline Jorgensen says the local plan is "deeply flawed", praising parts such as Green Belt protection but warning the Hall Farm proposals are a problem.
She told councillors: "When the Plan was debated in September 2024, there were parts local Conservatives agreed with, such as protection of the Green Belt. However, we had concerns about almost 4,000 houses at Hall Farm. One of the main accesses to the Hall Farm site is via a single-lane bridge over the M4 to Lower Earley Way, joining at the Meldreth Way roundabout. This will cause a significant increase in traffic on this road, which as everyone knows is often gridlocked at peak times, and will particularly affect my residents in Hillside, as well as people currently living in Hawkedon, Shinfield and Winnersh. I am worried inadequate provision has been made to cope with this. Lower Earley Way is already badly congested, the Showcase roundabout floods, and it is also a contingency route for the M4 traffic."
Council leader Stephen Conway defends the plan, saying planned development beats "development anarchy" and that inspectors would not progress unless the plan was sound.
He said: "I find Pauline’s opposition to the plan curious. It’s based on a draft drawn up by her party when it ran the council. She was in the executive that approved the draft, which included all the major development sites included in the current version – including Hall Farm. For her first year or so in opposition, she was calling on the new administration to get on with processing with the plan we had inherited from the Conservatives. She changed her tune only in the months preceding the 2024 elections. She was right first time round."
Conway added: "The plan is the best we can do to accommodate the housing numbers we are given by the government. Besides allocating housing sites, it determines our local policies on affordable housing, energy efficient new homes, more than 100 new protected green spaces, and 13 areas of valued landscape character, where development can be controlled. It’s the best we are going to get and without a plan developers can build wherever they like with limited ability on our part to stop them. Planned development is better than development anarchy."
Inspectors will hear arguments next week. The debate is now less about where houses were suggested in the last plan and more about whether roads around Lower Earley Way, Meldreth Way and the single-lane M4 bridge can cope.
Ted O'Neill, Local Democracy Reporter
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