Off to one of the town’s new towers

I’ve never felt sorry for the members of the RBWM cabinet. I now have sympathy.

Just when the field for this year’s award was left wide open following Cllr

McWilliams standing down (he of bringing the council into disrepute) and the front runners of Cllrs Clark and Coppinger were vying for the accolade, a curve ball from nowhere arrived.

Cllr Johnson spectacularly announces RBWM were forced to include more houses than needed in the Local Plan and he was the protector of the faith over greenbelt.

The competition has closed early, and he is anointed the 2023 ‘Spin to Save Your Skin’ winner.

I first read the Local Plan draft in the library in 2017. It had no vision, just a plan to build 14,000 new homes.

During the five plus years since, I attended every stage of inspector hearings (real and virtual), objected at every consultation, provided detailed traffic impact analysis using RBWM’s own data demonstrating gridlock, asked a question at the adoption hearing (dismissed by my own ward councillor), attended the High Court hearing over the BLP and have objected to the first application in

Cookham (actually eight objections calling out the omission of safe access information in the BLP).

This weekend I reviewed all my notes and recordings of BLP events (thank you YouTube).

Not once during all this time and events I witnessed, has any representative stated that they don’t really want to build on the greenbelt or there are too many flats.

Of course, Cllr Johnson and the current head of planning avoided the hearings. I might be vindicated, but it’s a disgrace. The sequential tests that determine priority of sites (that was conveniently avoided in the BLP) is now nonsense and the fictitious plan to build on council land (to pay the debt) first and to favoured developers that would follow, is against the rules.

The Local Plan now must be dissolved by any administration.

High Court here we come again.

The shock of this overt electioneering stance just shows how desperate the Tory leadership are.

Don’t be conned, put them out of their misery on May 4 and banish them to the trinity of 15-storey towers in Maidenhead.

They are all flats.

PAUL STRZELECKI

Cookham