Firstly a welcome for people newly discovering this site. With the delivery of thousands of letters from Wokingham Borough Council across the affected areas of the borough, the first of which arrived yesterday we have a significant increase in people visiting our site and in enquiries. Please bear with us if we don’t reply immediately. Please sign up to our mailing list, Facebook page or Twitter feed if you have not already done so to keep up to date.

For the benefit of everybody we thought we’d give a quick summary:

• The one thing you can’t do in this consultation is object to the principle of building houses – Wokingham Borough Council decided to adopt Arborfield Garrison and surrounding land in Barkham, Finchampstead and Swallowfield as a strategic development location in October 2011, you can see some of the media coverage of that here.
• This application is only for part of the land, there will be a second application for an additional 1,500 houses that you will be asked to comment on that is expected in a few months.
• The MoD is closing the garrison, but they are retaining housing on the site – the upshot of this is that army personnel who currently walk to work on the base will be joining the commuters going to other nearby bases such as Aldershot.
• There are a number of landowners involved, the Defence Infrastructure Organisation, Mr and Mrs Kenyon and the Aegean Trust are in a consortium, the Finchampstead based Marino Family Trust are separate.
• Whilst of late the public facing documents tend to talk about a village and play up the rural aspects of the development, reading the actual planning application documents in many places they talk about this as the centre of a new town.
• From the MoD point of view, underscored by their comments at recent announcement of a main developer this is about making as much money as possible to finance the new base in Wiltshire.
• Given that the principle of building is adopted, the developer only has to prove that their development will produce “nil detriment” on the surrounding area – how they propose to do that is explained in the traffic documents, and in pretty well all cases is by installing traffic lights at key junctions such as California Crossroads and the various roundabouts in Barkham.
• The plans have no details at all on the proposed Arborfield Bypass, as the developer wants to put traffic lights at Arborfield Cross instead. Nor do they have any mitigation plans for Eversley, which they do not seem to regard as their problem.

We are currently studying the application and will make further comment once we have looked in more detail.

Please note that in common with all Wokingham Borough Council consultations the volume of responses is important, so for example a petition of any size would be considered one response as would a letter from one person. As a result rather than one letter per family, one differently worded letter from each member of your household would make more impact in terms of responses.

Whilst we wait for the staff at Wokingham Borough Council to scan in the 21 boxes of paperwork for the outline planning application, and for the developers themselves to get the planning application uploaded to their own Arborfield Vision site, an interesting map to take a look at.

This map is generated from the UK Election Maps site which is a useful resource for working out who your parish or local council is, or which parliamentary or european constituency you are in. It is worth looking at for the Arborfield Garrison SDL because it does highlight quite how misleading the name actually is!

Looking at the map, Wokingham Borough ward boundaries are in purple, and the parish council boundaries in blue. The first thing you’ll notice from them is that through the garrison the two boundaries are subtly different – the Arborfield Garrison Community Centre is in the Arborfield Parish Council area, but is in the Barkham Ward, similarly with some of the houses along Bramshill Close and Valon Road.

You’ll also notice quite how little of the SDL is actually in Arborfield, in terms of areas Barkham has most of the SDL, followed by Finchampstead, then Arborfield, and finally there is a very small triangle of land that is under Swallowfield.

Assuming the phasing plan presented by the developers last week is what actually happens, the first houses will be built in Swallowfield and Finchampstead. No new houses at all will be built in Arborfield. All of the development in Barkham is on brown field, previously developed land, most of the development in Finchampstead and all of the development in Swallowfield is on green field, undeveloped land.

Thank you to everyone who took the time and trouble to attend the Arborfield Garrison Landowners Consortium hosted exhibition of their planning application this week. Although once again there were issues with pre-publicity, a large number of people turned up to review the plans.

In general we were pleased to see that the plans were broadly the same as those which had come from the community planning weekend earlier in the year, with small changes such as the addition of allotments or a community orchard adjacent to the tennis courts on Baird Road rather than significant relocation of key buildings or new housing areas.

The plans causing most discussion of course were the developers traffic mitigation plans.

Notably absent were any plans for a bypass – this being because the AGLC proposal (mentioned on one of the boards) is still changes to the Arborfield Cross roundabout – and also any mitigation for the Finchampstead stretch of the A327 down to the Tally Ho and on into Eversley. Questions on those areas were generally referred to Wokingham Borough Council and not the developers problem. What plans there were showed some consistency in that the developers answer to all the potential traffic black spots, Barkham Road and California Crossroads for example, seems to be to remove existing mini roundabouts and replace them with traffic lights. By way of an example under the developer plans the four mile drive into Wokingham from Arborfield would go through four additional sets of traffic lights within the space of a mile going through Barkham. Another proposal which perhaps people didn’t spot is to ‘solve’ issues with Commonfield Lane by making it a one way street.

Other issues were ones of phasing, in particular around the secondary school. The AGLC representatives were highlighting that Wokingham was wanting the secondary school open by September 2015, the problem being that it is adjacent to one of the last parts of the garrison to be occupied and according to their own phasing plans an area that won’t be developed until 2017. It is perhaps not the ideal educational environment to have a full scale demolition going on right next door to the school…

As ever we would welcome any feedback or comments on the exhibition members may have, and we will feed that back to the next liaison meeting with the council in a couple of weeks.

The full planning application will eventually be available online at the Wokingham Borough Council website. AGLC have made their exhibition boards available online copies can be seen below:

Exhibition Boards 25th April 1

Exhibition-Boards 25thApril 2

Tonight’s Finchampstead Society Traffic Presentation was well attended, much as with the Highways Forum extra chairs were needed to accommodate everybody who attended.

The presentation was a simplified version of the presentation given recently to the Arborfield Forum, generally with a lot fewer figures, and this perhaps made for a clearer understanding for those present. The presentation didn’t give a different message than on that occasion either – even without any houses being built there are a number of problems with the network, but with the SDL’s in place everything is much worse. The most interesting part was the question and answer which raised several issues which have not been discussed previously.

• Wokingham Level Crossing A former resident of Barkham who now lives in Finchampstead highlighted the crossing in Wokingham as a potential problem area. According to the answer given a bridge or underpass was considered but calculated too expensive compared to the potential benefits.
• California Crossroads Issues around Nine Mile Ride and California Crossroads were raised, and the comment in reply was that as a known issue already Wokingham had explored engineering solutions, but the solutions that would properly address the issues were considered to be unacceptable to local residents – no elaboration as to what those solutions might be we’re given.
• How Many Houses will Actually Be Built? Cllr Simon Weeks made an interesting statement towards the end of the evening. He highlighted that a number of other local councils such as West Berkshire have failed to get a core strategy in place, and one result of this is that it is a lot easier and cheaper for developers to build in these areas than in Wokingham where the core strategy sets a much higher developer contribution – somewhere around £25,000 per house compared to the £5000 per house the council has obtained previously. Simon is hopeful that having this high level of contribution means that although we have locations in Wokingham they won’t necessarily get built out. Currently we have over three thousand houses in the borough granted permission, but that have yet to be built.

All in all it was an interesting presentation, and our thanks to the Finchampstead Society for hosting the event.

Tonight the Arborfield SDL Community Forum met for the fourth time at the Henry Street Garden Centre, can we also offer our appreciation to the Goold brothers for graciously offering the use of their coffee shop area for the meeting – given the interest and numbers of attendees at the forums now it is good to have a location that can both hold everybody in comfort, and which provides adequate car parking.

The meeting this time consisted of two presentations, one by Cllr Keith Baker, and one by Tracey Coleman Assistant Head of Development Management at the council, followed by a breakout session for each area to gather requirements for upcoming discussion topics.

Cllr Baker covered highways matters, this time looking further afield than the Arborfield Bypass, taking in Barkham Bridge and discussions about Eversley. As might be expected from a politician there was a good bit of political spin, for example we know that the discussions he mentioned with Eversley Matters are not nearly as advanced as was suggested, indeed our colleagues in Eversley were further taken aback by some of the discussion about an Eversley Bypass. Certainly from our position we bring together residents from across the county boundary, all of whom have legitimate concerns of the effect of the development. Although it is obviously tempting to present matters from a Wokingham centric viewpoint, as open meetings Eversley residents and councillors are always well represented and we would encourage councillors and staff from Wokingham to present their comments and thoughts accordingly. Cllr Baker also made mention of funding, where the council is lobbying for funding from the Local Enterprise Partnership – there is a time critical element for this because with a General Election due in 2015, the opportunity to secure funding may change were a new government to be elected, much as it did when the current government was elected and swept away the previous structures.

Tracey Coleman covered the planning application itself, now expected from the Arborfield Garrison Landowners Consortium only at the beginning of April – there is no detail of when we might expect an application from the Marino Family. There will however be a single infrastructure plan for the whole SDL submitted with the AGLC application. None of the developers were officially represented at the meeting tonight, although as with the highways meeting there were representatives present.

Following the presentations the meeting split by geographical areas to gather lists of topics for future forum meetings. Many of the items brought up were issues that we have mentioned previously, however what was of most concern was the lack of knowledge displayed by the Finchampstead Parish Councillor listing the important items for Finchampstead, indeed at one point he said incorrectly that the Hogwood Lane Industrial Estate was not going to grow. This is totally incorrect, a doubling of the size of the Industrial Estate has been a key part of the development here. In addition all of the 1,500 Marino houses and a small number of the AGLC houses will be built in Finchampstead – this has implications for all Finchampstead residents as those additional people will have the right to be buried in the churchyard at Finchampstead, they will also as parish residents be able to apply for allotments on the recently opened Finchampstead allotment site. The influx will be a significant increase in the numbers of residents these councillors represent and we would urge the local parish councillors in Finchampstead to bring themselves up to speed with what is proposed for their parish, and the effects it will have on the people they represent before it is too late.

As discussed, Wokingham Borough Council has suggested that the primary channels of communication between the residents and the council as through the parish councils and ourselves as the residents group. We have additional meetings with staff and councillors between the quarterly forum meetings and we are happy to take any particular issues forward that you might wish to be raised. Please contact us using the website contact form if there are any issues you’d like to raise or any questions you would like answered and we will do our best to get answers or to direct you to the person who may be able to help you.

The development is coming whether we like it or not, what is important now is that we use whatever influence we have both individually and as a group to get the best outcomes for our communities.