With a 25% population explosion looming and councillors seemingly powerless to stop the development of 2500 new homes nobody wants or needs, I’ve been doing a bit of research on how the planning process works. I’m not an expert, a politician or a professional campaigner. I’m just someone who pays attention and has spent a few months trying to understand what’s happening to the town I live in.

What I’ve found isn’t reassuring.

The numbers

Thatcham’s population grew by about 0.5% between 2011 and 2020. Newbury’s grew by 8.3% over the same period. Thatcham’s office market saw roughly 85,000 square feet of new lettings over the past decade. Newbury’s saw over a million.

These aren’t my numbers: they come from a report the council commissioned itself, the Iceni Visioning Report (March 2022). The council paid for this evidence. It’s sitting there in plain sight.

Thatcham residents earn more on average than the jobs in Thatcham pay. That single fact tells you almost everything. People who live here commute out to Reading, to Newbury, to London, because the jobs they do aren’t here. The jobs that are here are mostly logistics, warehousing and distribution: Harrods, M&S and SSE have depots, there are several large storage operations on the Colthrop estate, and the newest major employer is a Thames Valley Police logistics hub. All fine in their own way, but none of them are the kind of employers that stop people getting on a train every morning - and they’re not the kind of jobs which will attract people to live here.

We lost Panasonic’s R&D operation years ago. We never replaced it. We do have Thatcham Research and Xtrac (genuinely innovative, high-skill businesses) but they’re the exception, not the rule.

The cycle

Here’s the problem as I see it.

Because residents commute out for work, there’s no real organic demand for commercial space in the town. Offices sit empty (you can see them on the A4, vacant for years) because the people who would fill them are all on the 7:15 to Paddington or driving to Newbury. Low demand means low land values for commercial use, which means developers build the cheapest, lowest-skill employment uses they can get planning permission for. Which means more logistics, more commuters, and lower demand for local commercial space.

Round and round it goes.

And the planning system, rather than breaking this cycle, is accelerating it. The district-wide housing target of 9,270 homes between 2023 and 2041 creates enormous pressure to allocate land for housing. Housing is what generates planning permission, what generates land value, what generates developer profit. Meanwhile, employment land sits next door getting steadily converted to warehousing because offices are empty and the incentive to build good employment space simply isn’t there.

2,500 new homes in NE Thatcham, without a serious plan for employment, will make this worse. Not immediately: the first few years will look fine, with new residents and new spending. But over time, as those residents commute out, as the local centres feel deserted, pubs and independent shops struggle to stay afloat, the roads get busier and the trains get fuller, the structural problem will be exactly what it was before, just much bigger, much worse.

The planning problem

The frustrating thing is that everyone seems to know this. Cllr Gaines has said publicly that “developers are going to squeeze every acre out of that site at the expense of our quality of life.” Cllr Pemberton, when I wrote to him about employment, replied thoughtfully about the need for a more joined-up approach. Cllr Cottam, when a logistics warehouse was proposed next to Colthrop, said “none of the jobs will be created locally” and voted against it.

They’re all right. And yet here we are.

The problem isn’t that individual councillors don’t understand the issue or don’t care - for the most part they do. The problem is that the planning system isn’t designed to solve it. Housing policy, employment policy, transport policy and infrastructure policy all operate in separate boxes, under different policies, at different stages of the process, with different decision-makers. You can argue for better employment provision until you’re blue in the face, but if employment land falls under Policy SP17 and the development is allocated under Policy SP14, those arguments land in different places at different times with no mechanism to connect them.

This is what I mean when I say the changes Thatcham needs are “distributed across multiple policies and timescales.” It’s not an excuse. It’s a description of a genuine structural failure in how planning works.

I want to stress that I’m not against housing in general: this isn’t about being a NIMBY, honestly! It’s clear that the housing market is in a terrible state across the country, with young people essentially locked out as prices rise and supply is tight. We do need more housing - but to me it seems obvious that new houses should be built where they are genuinely needed, not dumped in bulk wherever is easiest or most profitable for developers!

Planning by increment

There’s a second problem, closely related.

Even when the planning system does require something good (schools, healthcare, green space, employment) there’s no guarantee it gets delivered. Large developments like NE Thatcham will come forward as multiple separate planning applications, one neighbourhood at a time, each negotiated separately. Each applicant can argue that the wider obligations are disproportionate to their specific phase. “The canal crossing isn’t needed for this phase.” “The secondary school can wait for Phase 3.” “The local centre will come with later phases.”

This is how 2,500 homes get built with the infrastructure always promised for the next phase that never quite arrives. The Sandleford Park development south of Newbury is the local precedent: the SPD was adopted in 2013, the first reserved matters application was submitted in April 2025, twelve years later. The infrastructure that was supposed to come with the homes is still not built.

The only protection against this is a strong SPD: one that fixes infrastructure requirements in absolute terms, not percentages; that requires a binding phasing matrix tying each house to specific infrastructure being operational; and that sets a binding maximum dwelling count so that creative use of higher-density affordable housing can’t become a loophole for building more homes than were ever planned.

What a genuinely joined-up approach would look like

I’m not naive enough to think this is easy. But I do think it’s possible, and I think the NE Thatcham development is actually an opportunity to try, if anyone has the will to take it seriously.

A joined-up approach would mean:

Employment phased alongside housing. Not as an aspiration in a local centre: as a binding obligation. No housing phase proceeds until the employment space for that phase is built and occupied. If the jobs don’t come, the homes don’t follow. This is how you break the cycle. Difficult to do, because commercial and housing plans are defined in different places and are hard to join, but not impossible.

A local centre that actually works. Not three takeaways and a Co-op: Minimum floorspace, required uses including real workspace, delivered early and tied to occupation triggers. We already have Bradley Moore Square and numerous other “vibrant local centres” as a lesson in what happens when this is left to the market.

Transport that works from day one. Regular buses running before the first residents arrive. A rail capacity assessment before a single commuter is added to Thatcham station. A southbound road crossing that doesn’t route every journey back through the town centre or across a congested, Victorian-era rail crossing.

Green space that’s actually protected. Not “approximately 50%.” A binding minimum in hectares, fixed before any other land uses are allocated, with private gardens and school playing fields explicitly excluded from the calculation. Meaningful preservation of trees and woodland areas and a site layout that preserves as much of the genuine beauty of the area as possible.

An honest conversation about density. The Inspector’s 2500 home minimum is achievable, but would make this one of the most densely populated areas of the town. If developers were allowed to match the density delivered on Kennet Heath, for example, we could see the number go up to 3000 and beyond! Sensible limits need to be set with a sensible mix of densities and housing types.

Why I’m still here

I’ll be honest: I don’t expect any of this to be easy, and I’m not certain any of it will happen. The developers have been working on this for years, they have professional consultants and lawyers, and they have a very strong financial incentive to build as many homes as quickly as possible, with as few obligations as possible.

But I do think the SPD process is a real opportunity. The summer 2026 draft SPD consultation is the last moment at which binding requirements can be placed on the development across the whole site. After that, it’s individual applications negotiated one at a time.

I’d rather try and fail than not try at all.