MP Ed Vaizey calls for hold on controversial Wallingford homes plans till after General Election (From The Oxford Times)

MP Ed Vaizey calls for hold on controversial Wallingford homes plans till after General Election

7:00am Wednesday 10th March 2010 in

• Skip social links
• Print
• Email
• Comments(3)

MP ED Vaizey says further decisions about house-building in Wallingford should be put on hold until after the General Election.

He said residents should demand the district council and Government halt plans to build 750 new homes in the town until the community had decided how it wanted to grow.

His call comes just a month before South Oxfordshire District Council decides which site should be earmarked for the new houses at a council cabinet meeting on April 8.

Protest groups are lobbying against development at three sites — Winterbrook, near the Slade End roundabout, and north of Wilding Way At a public meeting called by Mr Vaizey last Friday, architect Sir Terry Farrell said housing targets should not be set from above, and towns should not expand by building big housing estates on sites picked from a list nominated by big developers.

After the meeting, Mr Vaizey said: “I want the community of Wallingford to come together and have the guts to say, ‘We have gone about this the wrong way, we want to start again, so give us some breathing space’.

“I think the election coming up is an opportunity. After the election, whoever is in Government, we can revisit this issue.”

He said the day after the election, he planned to request a meeting with the new Secretary of State to ask for the plans to be halted.

He said: “I do think it is possible.

“Wallingford has been here for almost a millennium, and the idea we cannot stop and revisit this is absolutely bonkers.

“I am committed to trying to get this revisited and looked at again.”

Henley MP John Howell, who drew up the Conservatives’ Green Paper on planning, said an incoming Tory Government would let councils reduce their housing targets to figures originally asked for in 2006.

It would mean 10,200 homes for South Oxfordshire instead of the 10,940 eventually imposed on the district in the South East Plan.

But the district councillor responsible for planning, Angie Paterson, said the council could not get distracted by politics in the run-up to the election.

She said: “The council has to do what the Government of the day says. If we do not, the plan gets thrown back at us and a planning inspector will make decisions for us, and any local input gets taken out. If we find ourselves with a Conservative Government, we may have an opportunity to review it, but I don’t want to get involved in a whole lot of speculation that is a waste of time and sends us down the wrong path.”

The constituency's Liberal Democrat candidate, Alan Armitage, said if elected, he too would lobby for the housing allocations to be reduced.

He said: “Allocating large numbers of houses to existing communities is unsustainable for a lot of reasons.

“I would certainly look at trying to get a review of whether we really have to allocate 750 houses all together in one lump.”