By Wokingham Borough Council leader
Stephen Conway
The new local plan, which is how the council delivers the housing required by central government and sets local planning policies, can nearly be brought before the council for approval. Once that is secured, it will be the subject of a planning enquiry, chaired by a government-appointed planning inspector, who will decide whether the plan can be adopted.
The current administration at Wokingham inherited a draft local plan from the previous Conservative administration, which began work on a new local plan as long ago as 2015.
In 2022 we decided to review the draft it had inherited, seeking legal advice on how much leeway we had to alter it.
In essence, our room for manoeuvre was limited. The draft, in short, is the point at which key decisions are made which cannot – except in the most unusual circumstances – be unmade. Any attempt to withdraw a site is likely to be challenged successfully by the developers at the inspector’s enquiry.
But if we have not been able to do much to alter the site allocations in the draft plan (apart from on land that the council itself owns), we have devoted a great deal of time and effort to improving the local planning policies that are an essential part of the local plan.
We hope that the council will approve bold new policies - on energy efficiency in new homes, on affordable housing contributions from developers, on designated green spaces (with the equivalent of green-belt protection in the open countryside), and on identified areas of public landscape value, where any development would have to respect the special geographical features of the area in question.
In terms of housing sites, we have little room to change what was proposed by our predecessors. But at least on planning policies, we have an opportunity to greatly improve on the draft plan that we inherited.
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