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2500 new homes are coming to Thatcham. But the housing development is not happening in isolation, it’s part of West Berkshire council’s Local Plan, adopted in June 2025. What can we learn about the development and the future of our community by looking in more depth at the wider strategy? What can we expect Thatcham to look like in a decade’s time? What will it be like to live here?

The answers are far from promising, as with the housing development, the plan for jobs and commercial growth in the area seems to favour hitting floor-space targets and filling quotas over making any effort to improve the lives of Thatcham’s current and future residents.

There’s nothing to be gained by standing by and watching a bad thing happen, though, and there are things we can do to ensure a brighter future for the town. Read on to find out more.

A town is more than just a bunch of houses

There’s more to a town than just building a shed load of houses. A prosperous and happy town needs jobs for the people who live there as well as services like supermarkets, shops, pubs, restaurants, hairdressers, cafes and so on.

Towns also need schools, doctors, transport links and really basic stuff like electricity, water and sewage infrastructure. These topics are too big to cover in this blog, but I do call them out [here](https://thatchamplan.co.uk/north-east-thatcham/) and will hopefully dig deeper into each in future.

In this post I want to focus on understanding what life will be like in Thatcham once the 2500 new homes have been built, and to do that we need to think about where people will work, shop and socialise.

The residential and commercial plans

The problem with trying to look at the housing and commercial side of the development is that the details are spread across different documents and plans, governed by different processes and people. One for the housing development we all know about and another for commercial development - offices, factories, warehouses, hotels, shops and the like.

Planning law is complicated! I wrote more about how it works here. If you want more detail on the specific documents and processes, expand the section below.

National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF)
  └── West Berkshire Local Plan
        └── Policy SP1 (the 'spacial strategy')
        └── Policy SP14 (the NE Thatcham housing allocation)
        └── Policy SP17 (the employment policy)

Policy SP14 is the plan for 2500 houses on farmland around the north eastern edge of Thatcham. “SP” stands for “Special Plan” by the way. Policy SP17 is the employment policy which sets out the plans for employment land across the whole county, including Colthrop Industrial Estate, south of the A4 in Thatcham. Policy SP1 ties the other two together, naming Newbury and Thatcham as the district’s “focus for business development” in the same breath as naming Thatcham for housing growth. These all roll up into the Local Plan which defines what will happen in West Berks between 2023 and 2041 and itself sits under central government’s National Planning Policy Framework.

Phew!

If that weren’t complicated enough, the scope, numbering and intentions behind these documents have changed multiple times over the last few years. If you decide to google on the subject, you might find yourself getting confused by this (I know I did!). Critically…

  • The Local Plan’s timeframe was altered from 2022-2039 to 2023-2041
  • North East Thatcham was policy SP17, and employment land was policy SP20. This was changed in the final adopted Plan (2023–2041) on 10th June 2025. NE Thatcham became SP14, employment land became SP17.
  • The size and scope of both SP14 and SP17 have been increased multiple times, often against the wishes of local councillors.
  • Physical link: SP14’s own site description places the new estate’s eastern edge directly against Colthrop Industrial Estate; ESA1 (ESA1 = the site-specific employment allocation) sits right there.
  • Structural link, and the sharpest finding of the whole piece: the original draft of SP14 required “approximately 1,100 sqm” of local retail/business floorspace as part of the 2,500-home site. The Planning Inspector explicitly struck out that figure as “not justified,” leaving the final, adopted policy with no floorspace floor at all — just “local centres providing local retail facilities and small-scale business-use.” This is a stronger, more citable version of “there’s no jobs guarantee” than anything inferred from the adopted text alone.
  • DM31 (Designated Employment Areas) is the mechanism that explains why the interlink pushes toward warehousing rather than homes on adjacent land — Colthrop Estate is explicitly listed as DEA #18 in the Council’s own evidence base.

Citations:

Section 2 — The risks (four named, one line of evidence each)

Notes: Resist dumping all the research here — pick the sharpest single proof point per risk, footnote the rest.

Risk 1: It’s warehouses, and the record shows it.

  • ESA1 = B2/B8, already mostly pre-let before the Plan was adopted (footnote 106 to the policy: 19,536 sqm B2/B8 permission 21/02130/OUTMAJ, plus a Thames Valley Police “Logistics Hub” permission 23/02965/FULMAJ).
  • Named case study, independent of ESA1: Flexspace No.3 LLP demolished two 1980s office buildings off Colthrop Way and replaced them with two warehouses (70,152 sq ft combined). The site has since been bought by Kingsbridge, an industrial investment fund, as a straight logistics play.

Risk 2: Warehouses are job-light by design.

  • Primary source figures, HCA/Homes England Employment Density Guide (3rd edition, 2015): office 8–13 sqm NIA/FTE depending on sub-sector; B2 industrial 36 sqm GIA/FTE; B8 storage & distribution 70–95 sqm GEA/FTE depending on type (Regional Distribution Centre 77, National Distribution Centre 95). Roughly a fifth to a seventh of the job density.
  • SP17 and ESA1 measure success entirely in square metres — no job-density, sector-mix, or wage requirement anywhere in the policy text (confirmed by reading both in full).

Risk 3: It’s not well-connected, it’s just cheap.

  • The Council’s own 2022 Employment Land Review, quoted in a live appeal decision: West Berkshire is “a credible location of large scale storage and distribution helped by comparatively lower rents… making it an attractive location for those occupiers being ‘priced out’ of more expensive locations, closer to London and Reading.”
  • SP17’s own supporting text (para 7.14) says large B8 demand “tends to be at the motorway junctions” — Colthrop isn’t at one; nearest are M4 J13 (via A34) and M4 J12 (via A4 through Woolhampton, a single-carriageway village pinch-point).
  • Widening out: the CP Logistics appeal at Theale — decided 31 July 2025 (correcting an earlier date I gave in conversation) — shows the Council actually refusing a comparable B8 scheme and losing at a public inquiry, once the employment-land-shortfall argument was invoked. The appellant’s parent company was named in evidence as Panattoni, a large industrial/logistics developer — worth a sentence noting this is a district-wide pattern, not unique to Thatcham.

Risk 4: The office figure propping up “balance” is stale.

  • The Council’s own February 2024 evidence update (Rapleys LLP) states plainly that observed, real-world office trends are “deeply negative,” and the positive office figure exists only because a theoretical labour-demand forecast (Experian, June 2022) was used instead. That forecast has not been rerun since.
  • Nuance to include: national office attendance is actually recovering (44.2% average weekly attendance, Feb 2026, highest since 2020) — so “nobody wants offices anymore” is the wrong claim. The real dynamic is a flight to quality: prime, well-located stock is tight; secondary, dated, out-of-town stock (exactly what Colthrop had) is what’s failing.

Citations:

Section 3 — The default worst case

Notes: Write as a plain scenario, not a bullet list. This is where “engaging” earns its keep — the only section that’s genuinely a projection rather than a documented fact, so keep the tone speculative-but-grounded and cite the base rates rather than asserting outcomes as certain.

  • National base rate for this category of development: Place Alliance’s Housing Design Audit for England (UCL/CPRE, 2020) audited 142 large-scale volume-housebuilder schemes and found 75% scored “mediocre” or “poor,” with one in five so bad they judged they shouldn’t have been granted permission at all.
  • No guaranteed supermarket (Pemberton’s email flags this as still unresolved), no co-working, “local centres” delivered at the policy minimum — which, per Section 1, has no minimum left in it.
  • Meanwhile Colthrop keeps recycling ageing office stock into more B2/B8 one uncontested application at a time.
  • Close on: nothing here requires bad faith. It’s what “policy-compliant” produces when nothing beyond compliance is asked for.

Citations:

Section 4 — What to lobby for

Notes: Frame as five specific, yes/no-able asks, not vague aspiration. Close on the live timing hook.

  1. Guaranteed anchor supermarket/grocery in the local centre — justified by evidence that hybrid-worker spending shift is led by groceries, not cafés.
  2. Explicit flexible workspace/co-working provision, sized and reserved — not wishful: Patch (funded UK operator, B-Corp) is actively expanding into towns with exactly Thatcham’s profile (rail link, green space, missing workspace) — Bournemouth, Chelmsford, High Wycombe, Twickenham, York, Gloucester are current/upcoming locations.
  3. A genuine business park element with A4 access, alongside (not instead of) industrial floorspace — Pemberton’s own idea, currently only a private view in correspondence.
  4. A design-quality commitment benchmarked against Place Alliance / Building for a Healthy Life — the Inspector’s unusual requirement for an adopted masterplan SPD before any application is a real lever most strategic sites don’t get.
  5. A formal push on the five-year employment land review — specifically asking whether the Experian forecast underpinning the office figure has been rerun since June 2022.

Live timing hook — verify immediately before publishing, this has moved before: the Council’s own published masterplan timetable puts Draft Masterplan consultation at June–July 2026, with Council adoption pencilled for November 2026. As of today (13 July 2026) that consultation window may be open right now. The official project site currently states the first engagement stage (April–May 2026) has closed and describes the next milestone as “Late 2026 Masterplan submitted to West Berkshire Council” — there is some inconsistency between the Council’s article page and the project site on the precise draft-consultation dates, so check https://nethatcham.co.uk/ directly before publishing to confirm whether the June–July window is still live or has already closed.

Citations:

Adopted policy documents

Evidence base

Examination and adoption

North East Thatcham Masterplan (live)

Employment land appeals (district-wide context)

Town centre / place-making

Market/commercial colour

Design quality / national evidence

Hybrid work / local economy evidence

National office market context

Outstanding actions before publishing

  1. Re-check nethatcham.co.uk for the current status of the draft masterplan consultation — the June–July 2026 window may be open, closing, or already closed by the time you publish; the site copy and the Council’s article page gave slightly different next-steps language when I checked.
  2. Replace or drop the two dead links (Thatcham Park / thatchampark.com and the Cogent Thatcham Business Centre listing) — see notes above for the planning application reference that can stand in for the former.
  3. The ⚠-flagged links all resolved reliably in search results but weren’t individually re-fetched in this final pass — worth a quick click-through before publishing, particularly the Penny Post and The Planner links, which are behind bot-detection and couldn’t be verified by direct fetch at all (they may still be fine for a human reader, just not fetchable by this tool).