Luton & South Beds. Joint Planning Committee (JPC)

 

OPTION 2: Remove east of Luton

 

It is not for KEOLG to say where any housing that is displaced by taking out east of Luton from the Core Strategy should go: this is for the Joint Planning Committee to decide.

 

East of  Luton is totally unacceptable on many counts, not least because it is an outstandingly beautiful area of Green Belt across the border in North Herts. As such it is outside the area that falls within the proper responsibility of the Joint Planning Committee.

 

You can learn more about why east of  Luton is unacceptable elsewhere on this site:

 

There are alternatives such as more development north of Luton , around Leighton Buzzard, to the west of Luton and more.

 

You may well have seen that there has been a great deal of publicity surrounding a possible alternative area for expansion – an area to the west of Luton, essentially towards Slip End and Caddington.  This area is favoured by a development consortium who have been developing detailed plans and carrying out technical appraisals at their own expense.  It is NOT for KEOLG to favour one alternative to east of Luton over any other, so we simply provide you our reader with a link so that you can go and see for yourself what this publicity is all about.

 

Just like the area to the east of Luton the possible expansion area to the west of Luton is also into Green Belt land, albeit Green Belt land that is actually within Bedfordshire.  This area was included as a possibility in early versions of the East of England Plan and the Milton Keynes & South Midlands sub-Regional Strategy.  Expansion into this area is strongly opposed by some members of the JPC, in some cases because it is their constituents who live in that area, in other cases because of similar reasons to those we share about east of Luton.

 

As Keep East of Luton Green we are mindful that the JPC could decide to include development in other areas hitherto omitted from the Core Strategy – this would perhaps represent a way for the JPC to be seen to be more “open-handed”, whilst requiring as little change as possible to the existing Core Strategy.  Such changes to the Core Strategy may mean that east of Luton is not removed completely as it surely ought to be, but remains with a reduced level of development. Whichever way, this would be a significant amount of work for the Joint Technical Unit (JTU) and would inevitably add both extra costs and time into the processing of producing a new pre-submission version of the Core Strategy.