Option 6 is by far a preferable strategy. The Council's planning department has a narrow-minded, entirely urban-focussed view of sustainability, one that it has maintained for 30 years. Our rural areas have now become inert enclaves for the retired, stripped of affordable housing for young families and lacking in encouragement for the setting up of anything other than a narrow range of "rural-only" businesses.

While I support the wider distribution of housing in rural key service centres I do so because my preferred option is not even on the table. I believe that the variety and individuality that has traditionally characterised rural development in North Beds is being killed off by the council's current policies.

By insisting all rural housing is concentrated within SPAs in Rural Key Service centres and a few designated small settlements the council is actually sacrificing their inherent character at the altar of sustainability. By doing so it knows that rural dwellers will instead support Options such as 2a, 2b, 2c, and 2d, because the alternatives are wholly unpalatable. It is manifestly a deliberate strategy formulated by the planning department, in order to force and implement its own particular strategic vision on the people of the Borough.

My preference would be to greatly loosen and expand the SPAs around villages, allowing for development that wasn't intensely packed, as current policies encourage. North Beds has many small '"Ends" where there are ample opportunities for sensitive development/redevelopment, as they always have been. The Local Plan 2030's Policies 5S, 6 and 7S have killed off whatever possibility there might be for such development in such settlements, as I warned they would at a meeting of the Executive in September 2018.

Bedford Borough Council essentially wants the rates paid by people in the rural area but doesn't want to allow any significant expansion of development there because it will be expensive for it to service with regards to services. However, the inevitable outcome of this tunnel-vision strategy is that rural areas will continue to wither economically - as they have done over the last 30 years - and simply end up as retirement villages, affordable only to those who have accumulated wealth or who are in the third trimester of their lives.