Cala Homes’ plans for up to 1,500 properties at Maidenhead Golf Course have been unanimously approved.
Councillors supported the outline proposals at a special meeting of the development management committee of the Royal Borough on February 13.
The fiercely-opposed scheme, to be called Elizabeth Quarter, will also include primary and secondary schools, commercial space and open space on the 53-hectare site in Shoppenhangers Road. The homes will include a 30 per cent proportion of affordable properties and there will be self-build options.
Cala’s representative at the meeting told the committee: “We acknowledge the concerns of some members of the community to this application.
“We fully appreciate that change, particularly on this scale, can be challenging and we do not take these concerns lightly.
“However, we firmly believe that this development will bring significant benefits to Maidenhead, delivering much-needed homes, infrastructure and opportunities to the people of Windsor and Maidenhead.
“Also, I would highlight that from our public consultation events, we met many local people in support of the proposals with many welcoming the need for family homes and increased local facilities.”
She noted the council’s inability to demonstrate a five-year housing supply and added: “If this site does not come forward, it will require this housing to be provided elsewhere in the borough. The housing need simply does not go away – housing requirements are ever increasing.”
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What a wonderful opportunity to add in perpetuity a unique amenity to Maidenhead’s heritage is doomed. The local council lost its way years ago in the fog of local spatial myopia. Ten years of spatial policy failure due to leaders unwillingness to tell local electors the whole truth about housing is the culprit. You cannot have economic growth and increasing local prosperity without spatial change. Lots of new homes are needed in Windsor and Maidenhead. With over 80% of the land, though flat and without untamed peaks, protected by green belt policies the homes must go somewhere else. Choosing this piece of land, already owned by the council, was a cowardly land use error which future generations will resent.
But Maidenhead’s homes must go somewhere. Well if it can be avoided, do not build them on protected land will be the sensible view of most residents. A few years ago Peter Brett, consultant engineers (now Stansted) at the council’s request proposed lots of small sites elsewhere in the borough and one isolated big site as a housing land supply solution. Its solution must have withered. Such a spatial answer will be electorally toxic as opponents of change in each neighbourhood, many already veterans of opposition campaigns prepare to oppose any building near them.
The place to build must be the nearest unprotected land, even if it is in the adjoining council area. But this too will be contentious for the host community. Unless of course there are substantial financial incentives offered to households in these host communities, paid for through their rates by the households in the overspill communities. This too will be toxic!
It is easy to see why local councils avoid these issues, but the result is unwanted development in shameful locations. We have had a generation of spatial policy failure. Looking at decades of broken planning policy, it seems as if building lots if new homes in places with local support is impossible.
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