Some facts about Woodley’s CCTV

Since last year, when the new Woodley Town Council was formed following elections, all councillors have been great in leaving their political allegiance at the door of any meeting.

Until now.

A recent Labour leaflet distributed to residents of Loddon Ward contained false statements about the Town Council voting against the provision of CCTV in Woodley Precinct.

This accusation is totally and utterly false, as the publicly available documents clearly indicate.

It is ironic that the week after a

Lib Dem Councillor calls for honesty in your paper the Labour party in Woodley prove the point about dishonesty.

Town Cllr Greg Bello, who is a Labour candidate for Borough in the Loddon ward, clearly stated this even though both he and Town Cllr Nagra (another Labour candidate featured in the same leaflet) are members of the committee that reviewed it and actually voted for the final proposal!

Here are the facts which anyone can verify by looking at the published minutes.

The proposal , which everyone, including Cllrs Bello and Nagra, voted for clearly stated “To defer the decision on allocating funds from the available Capital Programme funds to support the project until the next meeting in September”.

If you look at the summary of the discussion the minutes say “Members requested that more

information, including a full business case, be provided by the Town Centre Manager, and that the matter be deferred to the next meeting of the committee.”

It is clear that the allegations from Cllr Bello, supported by Cllr Nagra, are false and it is unfortunate that these two candidates decided to paint a different false for political benefit.

Do the voters of Loddon Ward in Woodley really want to have these two Town Councillors representing them on Wokingham Borough Council? If they can blatantly lie about

nd something that is very important to shopkeepers and residents alike around the provision of CCTV, what else will they lie about?

Cllr Keith Baker, leader Woodley Town Council. He is not standing for re-election to Wokingham Borough Council

Inaccuracies on local plan

I read with increasing incredulity the leader of the opposition’s column on planning in last week’s Wokingham Today.

The column contains so many falsehoods and inaccuracies that it’s difficult to cover them all. Suffice it to say that she fails completely to understand the situation and makes pledges that fly in the face of her earlier commitments.

She implies that we have not been fighting planning appeals robustly enough, which is an insult to our officers’ hard work and professionalism.

She also suggests that appeals have been lost in large numbers; in reality, we are winning as many appeals as the council did when it was under Conservative control.

For many months she has been

telling everyone that the current administration should get on and implement the oven-ready draft local plan that we inherited from the Conservatives.

In truth, that draft plan was far from oven-ready, and we have been working hard to improve it and bring to completion the unfinished parts of their draft.

Despite urging us to proceed with the Conservatives’ draft plan, which had a 4,500 dwelling housing development at Hall Farm at its heart, she now claims to be against Hall Farm’s inclusion.

She voted for it, but now, with elections near, she is opportunistically changing tack in the hope of winning votes.

The consequences of this gross irresponsibility need to be spelled out.

She claims that the new houses that her government insists we deliver

can be accommodated on ‘brownfield sites’.

Wrong.

There is nowhere near enough capacity on brownfield sites to meet the housing numbers imposed by the current government.

That means green-field land must be included, however much we might want to preserve it from development. Which green-field sites does she propose?

She needs to come clean on her own plans.

Is she going to try to build on protected greenbelt land? She has said no in the past, but she has changed her tune on so much that we cannot be sure what she intends to do.

Finally, she berates the current administration for delay, yet if she is radically to depart from the current draft local plan in the way she suggests, a very long delay is inevitable, as such a material change would require two fresh new public consultations before an agreed local plan could go to public enquiry.

The delay that her approach would bring would mean that the current local plan would expire before a new one came into force, and then the council would truly be exposed to the threat of uncontrolled development that she tells us she wants to avoid.

I’m afraid her article displays a complete ignorance of the planning system and a cavalier disregard for both consistency and honesty.

It’s very disappointing to read such a profoundly flawed piece written by someone who aspires to lead the council and even become an MP.

Cllr Lindsay Ferris, Executive

Member for Planning and the Local Plan, Wokingham Borough Council. He is not

standing for re-election

Water works

You reported last week Wokingham MP Sir John Redwood had blogged recently that, in respect of Thames Water: ‘...there needs to be an increase in spend and in customer contribution. If we want more and better sewers then either customers or taxpayers have to pay more.’ (Business Today, page 18).

I disagree with it being a binary choice.

Thames Water could instead invest more and pay its shareholders less dividend than they have creamed off consistently over past decades.

His analysis proves beyond doubt that he is an unreconstructed 1980s free-marketeer, completely out of touch with the plight of hard-pressed consumers and interested only in supporting big business.

Suzie Napier, Wokingham

Vote him out

Another week, another article pointing out that Sir John Redwood is making stupid comments on X. Why doesn’t anyone stop him? It reflects badly on Wokingham. The sooner he is voted out, the better.

Name and address supplied

Protect Greenland

We need to stop destroying Greenland to then put houses there instead.

Just think you wouldn’t like it if someone just came along and destroyed your house so why would we doing it to animals and plants.

Greenland is so delicate and important to so many species of plant and animals and we’re destroying it quickly and we need to stop it. We need our Greenland and not for putting houses on there, no we need Greenland for the animals and plants not for us.

Also NASA has calculated that Greenland has lost 5 trillion tons of weight since the early 2000s and glaciers are now melting six or seven times faster today than they were 25 years ago, it says.

Olivia Hunter, Wokingham

Abuse

I always read, with interest, reports in Wokingham Today – drawing to readers’ attention, the need for greater protection, from abuse, for women and girls.

Wokingham Borough Councillors are very dedicate to this cause. However, I also watched the recent television documentary My Wife, My Abuser.

It appears that abuse is not just meted out to women and girls, but goes on across the board.

On this subject, there is the new book A Very Private School, written by the late Princess Diana’s brother, Earl Spencer. He reveals the abuse of young children abandoned into boarding schools.

I have heard of instances of this type of abuse, many times, here at the crisis house, in well-heeled Wokingham. One lady, who was dumped in a local boarding school, as a young child, said, ’I wanted to be at home, with my mum, but I learned to deal with it – [boarding school] – because that is survival!’ This is an example of Earl Spencer’s concept of ‘forced abandonment’ – with the child’s suffering being ignored.

I have even seen a visiting local Conservative Councillor wince when the subject of school was mentioned. He had attended a particularly tough one – in Scotland.

Among our service users, another lady, who, as a child and teenager, suffered appalling emotional abuse from her stepfather, now, in her midthirties, still bears the scars.

Her mother told her, ‘You are very lucky to be getting a private education, and to be so, materially,

nd well-off.’

There are male victims as well.

One man, who comes from an upper middle-class background, with very well-educated parents, said they, nevertheless, ignored the fact that, as a child, he was being, systematically, sexually abused, by his sister. This man claims, bitterly, that social services are there only for the poor. We do have poor people in Wokingham; it is not affluent across the board, but even its well-to-do, can, and do, suffer abuse.

Yet another man, again with very well-educated parents – together with his brothers – suffered horrendous abuse from his father, again, with his mother failing to protect them.

He also claims that there is sympathy, and intervention, only when children are obviously, neglected, beaten, starved, and dressed in rags.

Judging by the diabolical track record of social services – with each decade producing, a high-profile case, of the murder of a child, which could have been prevented - from Maria Colwell in the 1970s, to Finley Boden, in the 2020s, I would claim further, that they don’t always intervene – even when the abuse is obvious.

With many people struggling, financially, it is quite true that there is, abroad, a general attitude, that if you are being privately educated, are well-dressed, well-spoken, and have plenty of money – then what are you moaning about?

Another of our service users, says of his prestigious boarding school, ‘There was no love.’ This is, yet again, the experience of ‘forced abandonment’.

When the Police finally arrived at his school to arrest a master who had been sexually abusing the boys, for years, it was found that he had hanged himself, and so escaped punishment.

As Louis de Bernieres says, ‘There is no restitution for us – because the truth is that no one gives a damn what happened to posh boys.

Our social morality extends only to underdogs.’ I shall conclude by commenting that it is not entirely true that NO ONE gives a damn what happened to posh boys.

Among others, we do.

Pam Jenkinson, The Wokingham Crisis House,

Station Road