Object

Representation ID: 6386

Received: 13/09/2021

Respondent: Mrs Kay Wade-Gery

Please accept this letter to register my objection to the planned development of 10,800 residences at your proposed Local Plan at the area known as Dennybrook.

I fully understand the need to provide housing in the Bedfordshire County, however, this proposal of area is unacceptable. The three hamlets, or four if you include the oldest estate in the County that is Bushmead Priory Estate, are a rural community of many years standing. The Bushmead Priory Estate has the oldest standing Priory in its condition in the Country along with a SSSI known as the Moats. The historical area has been in my husband’s family for almost 500 years and the reason these beautiful sites still exist is that this area has been kept as rural as it currently is. There are several other families that have been in this area for centuries and this development will change this ancient rural area.

The Bushmead Road is already a “rat run” for those motorists who are trying to avoid the major roads and over the years there have been multiple accidents and fatalities. Infrastructure is not a valid argument for not having such a development on our precious doorstep, as I am sure you and the powers that be would argue, that this will be taken into account, but should you wish to access the major roads I am left in no doubt that the winding and country roads will be made into even more than a death trap. Most deaths and road traffic collisions are on these such roads.

The historic local town of St Neots will be engulfed by a satellite housing mass and the benefits of this plan are outweighed by the negatives. The Dennybrook Town will become a dormitory town, with people commuting to the south-east, for higher salaries but lower cost housing and bring little to the local with them spending their monies elsewhere rather than locally and not supporting local businesses.

Your need to fulfill the need for housing is admirable but to ruin this quiet area of unspoilt countryside is an abomination. I am sure, as many of my fellow local residents feel, that rather than a whole new town, and that what this proposed development will become, adding smaller areas of housing into the current village populations would only help this area prosper and not invade the village and rural way of life. After all, many people that have moved into this area have come for just that…a rural life.

The agricultural land that you are proposing to develop is Grade Two farming land and not either brown field nor low grade cropping land. In these uncertain times with the UK leaving the European Union and the pandemic which the entire world finds ourselves in has highlighted the need for locally produced food and the need for the UK as a whole to become more self-sufficient.

Your obligation to meet the Government’s housing requirements are being put above the people who are living in this county currently and we feel that our voices are not being heard. The size and location of this proposed site is inappropriate and out of context to this very special part of idyllic North Bedfordshire. The loss of the prime agricultural land and rural life should not be traded for a development of this scale and on this proposed site. The development of the Cambridge to Oxford Arc is important to link the east of the country to the west but surely there must be more suitable sites for a development, even at this level than the proposed.

I implore you NOT to grant permission for this project.