Comment
Central Bedfordshire Design Guide SPD
Representation ID: 16129
Received: 07/03/2023
Respondent: Mr Paul Brown
As a journalist who has written about housing, sustainability and planning for some years I have been reading with interest your planning design guide. Much of the guidance is excellent and generally a useful pointer towards what developers should be aiming for.
The problem comes towards the end when it is clear that the document is merely aspirational. There is no mandatory application of the guide. Developers can (and almost certainly will) ignore it because there are lots of suggestions but no obligation to do anything. Obviously they will try to make their houses saleable but there is no injunction on them to make the estate surroundings or their environment good places to live. There is nothing to stop developers continuing to build cramped and badly designed housing of the sort we have seen continuously in Leighton Buzzard and elsewhere in Central Bedfordshire.
Unless the council strengthens the guide so that at least the basic principles of good design and standards are mandatory then in my view the council is largely wasting its time on a paper exercise.
A03
As a journalist who has written about housing, sustainability and planning for some years I have been reading with interest your planning design guide. Much of the guidance is excellent and generally a useful pointer towards what developers should be aiming for.
The problem comes towards the end when it is clear that the document is merely aspirational. There is no mandatory application of the guide. Developers can (and almost certainly will) ignore it because there are lots of suggestions but no obligation to do anything. Obviously they will try to make their houses saleable but there is no injunction on them to make the estate surroundings or their environment good places to live. There is nothing to stop developers continuing to build cramped and badly designed housing of the sort we have seen continuously in Leighton Buzzard and elsewhere in Central Bedfordshire.
Unless the council strengthens the guide so that at least the basic principles of good design and standards are mandatory then in my view the council is largely wasting its time on a paper exercise.