Object

Representation ID: 9590

Received: 29/07/2022

Respondent: Mr James Welling

Legally compliant? No

Sound? No

Duty to co-operate? No

Elstow is a historic village containing over 36 grade 1 and 2 listed properties. The proposed housing development will butt directly against the sites of many of these listed properties. It is a legal responsibility of the council to maintain a distance between the listed properties and any new development and that is clearly not being done with the proposal.The properties in the village have been listed due to their historic and architectural importance. The reason for listing a building is to preserve it's historic character. Elstow's character is defined by the number of listed properties it contains. The building of a housing estate next to these ancient buildings will totally undermine the rural nature of the village and impact negatively on the lives of the existing residents who have lived in this setting for many years.
The proposal is to build 200 houses on the site. Traffic through Elstow village is already in excess of what there should be due to drivers completely ignoring the 'prohibited vehicles' signs at each end of the village and zero enforcement taking place to ensure compliance with them. The addition of these 200 new properties will greatly increase traffic through the village and surrounding roads which already suffer traffic congestion regularly due to weight of traffic.
The proposed site is on prime agricultural land at a time when it is recognised that our nation needs to produce more of it's own food. The building of these houses would fly in the face of this need. The building of these properties would also lead to the loss of natural habitat for wildlife in the area.
There are already proposals to build 5000 houses on the Wixams site East of the A6 road and a further 1000 at Shortstown. There are also another 5000 houses proposed for a site at Marston, which, although in Central Beds, is still in geographical terms going to be close to the south of our area.
In total it is proposed to to build 17,500 houses in the locality of south Bedford. The existing infrastructure already struggles to cope with the population we have with waiting times for doctors and hospital appointments being excessive now. These additional houses will, in my opinion, push it to breaking point. The same applies to our road network which is already overloaded with vehicles, yet there is no proposal to improve this network and the addition of so many houses, with the accompanying vehicles, will simply lead to traffic gridlock.
We live in one of the dryest parts of the country, where this year, we have seen a fraction of our normal rainfall. There are only so many places where we can draw water from before the impact on our rivers, waterways, reservoires, etc becomes too much. Blindly asking the local water authorinty to provide water to service this vast number of houses simply does not take into account the toll it takes on our wider environment and this is unacceptable.
The proposed 200 houses would be constructed on land next to 2 major roadways, the A6 and A421. The undoubted increase in traffic on these roads will lead to an increase in polution near them and for an increase in the pollution levels for the residents of the proposed site. This would directly impact negatively on the health of those residents.