Object

Representation ID: 10020

Received: 27/07/2022

Respondent: Shortstown Parish Council

Legally compliant? Not specified

Sound? No

Duty to co-operate? No

We oppose the following policies.
Policy HOU17 Development at College Farm. Over the few years Shortstown has
been targeted for massive development. Between 2014 and March 2021 901 houses have
been built in the parish. When the Cardington Airfield development to the North of
the sheds has been completed another 592 houses will have been added. Once that is
complete that will be 1493 houses added to the parish since 2014. While the development of RAF Cardington did include a notional village centre this has been slow to develop
and Shortstown is still severely deficient in key services for the level of households now
within the parish. The Transport Model discussed in supporting documents shows the
A600/A421 junction is already forecast to be saturated and additional housing would only
make things worse. For this reason we would also object to large development within
the parish of Cotton End as that would also massively increase the strain on our limited
transport infrastructure.
The only data we could find via the DfT for traffic on the A600 is available at the following
URLs
Count point 77216 https://roadtraffic.dft.gov.uk/manualcountpoints/77216
Count point 81517 https://roadtraffic.dft.gov.uk/manualcountpoints/81517
Both of these points are on Tinkers hill on and the reason for changing ID is not known but they are both in approximately the same location. Discarding the estimated traffic numbers and plotting only those that were manually counted we can see that there has been
significant traffic growth on the A600. This is shown in the first figure. It is a reasonable conclusion that this significant increase in traffic coincides with and is caused by the recent housing increases in Shortstown. Given the very large site in Shortstown to the North East
of the two historic airship sheds which is at an early phase of construction additional large traffic growth is only to be expected.
(graph included in original submission)
As can be seen in the second included figure Shortstown has seen recent rapid change over
recent years and when the additional development to the North of the historic sheds is
included this pushes the developed area within the parish to roughly 25% of the parish.
This land use estimate was calculated using GIS software and creating polygons around
each development one at a time to allow both the area of each development to be calculated
and also to understand the cumulate area used for housing and its growth over time. The
data is available on request. The proposed College Farm and Shorts Park developments would completely change the character of the parish and ruin the future of the sheds and aireld for movie and airship use.
(graph Shortstown parish land use for Housing included in original submission)
Beyond that it is a reasonable conclusion from the existing growth in traffic and services demand we have seen College Farm would increase these problems still further and we have not yet even seen the full impact of developments that have already been approved.