Cookham's parish council will take action to fight back against 200-home plan

Cookham Parish Council has resolved to take its ‘last chance’ to fight back against an influx of 200 new homes in the village.

At a meeting on Tuesday evening, the parish council and a score of Cookham residents discussed their disquiet about two applications totalling 200 homes on Cannondown Road.

The application by Bellway Homes, are sketched in for an open field north of Lower Mount Farm (known under the site name AL37 in the Borough Local Plan).

Cookham Parish Council has been against this from the beginning – fighting the housing allocation at the Local Plan level and later criticising the developer’s masterplan for the site. They wanted three entrances, rather than a single access point, and for the homes layout to maintain a ‘village feel’ in keeping with Cookham.

Despite the many concerns, in order to battle this application, there would need to be ‘serious’ traffic issues as a demonstrable result of this housing development, the parish council said.

“That’s a high threshold to get over,” said Councillor Bill Perry (Cookham Ward).

As such, the parish council resolved to fight back by employing its own traffic consultant to review the impact on Cookham’s roads – while acknowledging that the battle ‘will not be easy’.

Traffic is a major concern – it is not about the Cannondown Road plan in isolation, but the effect of all development in the area which ‘dominoes back’.

Cookham High Street is the ‘area of severity’ in this regard, said CPC chairman Cllr Mark Howard.

He added that CPC’s ‘only chance’ of success in pushing back against Bellway ‘is to hire people more professional than those hired by the developer’.

Bellway’s representative, Turley, asserts that the development would generate a maximum of 144 two-way movements in the morning and 128 in the evening.

It said that Ardent (Consulting Engineers), found this data, and from this concluded that ‘the development would have no severe [traffic] impacts within the study area.’

Hiring its own consultants will be come at a cost of about £5,000 for the parish council.

Cllr Perry said: “I wouldn’t say we should go for this if I didn’t think it was worth it.”

Cllr Howard agreed, adding, “We’re doing this to make sure we have not missed any opportunity – this is the last real roll of the dice. It’s such a huge thing, it’s worth [that].”

He added that even if the traffic report received from its independent consultant does not show the data the parish council is expecting, it will still serve the purpose of showing that current traffic modelling from the developer is ‘all above board’.

“At the moment, our community does not necessarily believe that,” he said.

There was a discussion about whether or not the parish council should rely on funds generated by a crowd-funding page, set up by Cllr Harriet Pleming (West Ward, Cookham Dean).

This GoFundMe has raised about £3,370.

But ultimately it was decided that the parish council should take the helm and front the cost itself, giving it control of which direction it takes and the consultants it hires.

Councillors voted in favour of potentially accepting a donation towards the costs from the crowd-funded money.