POLICY LL5: Land SOUTH OF THE HIGH STREET
- The Neighbourhood Plan identifies Land South of the High Street, as shown on the Policies Map, as an opportunity for regeneration within the town centre. Proposals will be supported where they deliver a high-quality, mixed-use development. This may include residential, retail, community, cultural, leisure or employment uses appropriate to this location.
- Proposals should demonstrate regard to the Land South of High Street Spatial Framework as an expression of community aspiration.
- In applying the National Decision-Making Policy DP3 on key principles for well-designed places, development proposals should respond to their context as follows:
- A. Be heritage-led in approach, conserving and enhancing the significance of designated and non-designated heritage assets, including the setting of listed buildings and the character and appearance of the Leighton Buzzard Conservation Area.
- Respond positively to the site’s town centre context, including scale, massing and layout including historic plot patterns, scale, massing and ridge lines and preserving key views and visual connections;
- Retain and reuse existing buildings where viable and where their retention contributes positively to the character, sustainability and townscape quality of Leighton Buzzard Town Centre.
- Improve pedestrian and cycle connectivity within and around the site, including opportunities to enhance links between the High Street and Parsons Close Recreation Ground to enhance east-west movement and accessibility, where feasible and deliverable. Access arrangements must be informed by proportionate transport assessment.
- Apply a vision-led approach to transport, providing genuine alternatives to car ownership for future residents and visitors.
- Providing high quality cycle parking and active travel infrastructure.
- Demonstrating safe and convenient access to public transport; and
- Designing streets and spaces to reduce reliance on private car use.
- Provide town centre public parking where required to support the vitality and viability of the High Street and market function. Residential parking provision should reflect the highly accessible location.
- Protect and enhance water quality within the River Ouzel catchment and demonstrate compliance with relevant Local Plan and Environment Agency requirements, including buffer zones and pollution prevention measures.
- Integrate high-quality green infrastructure within the layout, including connectivity with the wider Leighton Linslade Green and Blue Infrastructure Network.
- Proposals which seek to provide any of the key community infrastructure identified in Policy LL11 (Infrastructure Priorities) either as a standalone proposal or as part of comprehensive redevelopment of the site, will be supported, where justified by proportionate evidence.
The Land South of the High Street site was identified in 2012 as a once in a lifetime opportunity to create a significant, positive addition to the town centre. Central Bedfordshire Council are the majority landowner for the site. They created a Development Brief in 2012 which sought to: “create a sustainable extension to the town centre shopping area which enhances the retail offer and the centre’s competitiveness, while preserving the town centre’s existing high-quality character, reinforcing its distinctiveness and enhancing the town’s historic character and environment.”
The site has historical significance of its own with gardens established by Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild in the late 19th Century and a World War Two telephone exchange linked to the RAF’s radar network and Bletchley Park. There are parts of both the Rothschild Stables and the telephone exchange building still present on the site.
Over the following decade there was very little progress in respect of bringing this vision forward; the Town Council created a re-worked masterplan in 2023 to stimulate interest in the site following several years of engagement and working parties involving the Town Council and CBC which had failed to progress the redevelopment of the area.
In early 2024 Central Bedfordshire Council decided to market the land in their ownership for residential use, with the potential for two parcels of land to be set aside for community use. The site was subsequently withdrawn from sale with no further activity to date.
The Neighbourhood Plan has therefore taken the opportunity to review the original 2012 Development Brief and the 2023 Town Council reworked masterplan to create a spatial framework for the site, prepared by AECOM which accompanies this Neighbourhood Plan. This spatial framework has also been subject to a high-level viability testing to inform the policy development.
The viability assessment was prepared as part of a funded package of technical support to assist the Steering Group in determining whether there is a robust and proportionate evidence base to support the inclusion of this site as an allocation within the Neighbourhood Plan. The work is high-level in nature and is intended to inform plan-making, rather than to present a detailed or fully deliverable scheme. In particular, it is relevant to demonstrating that the Plan contributes to the achievement of sustainable development, having regard to national policy, and that it is supported by appropriate and proportionate evidence.
Its outputs demonstrated that there could be a potentially viable scheme comprising of a mix of uses, principally residential, but including appropriate town centre and community uses. Whilst the assessment focused on market housing, there is nothing to stop a future developer seeking external funding, such as through the Social and Affordable Homes Programme or other government programmes, to support the delivery of affordable housing through gap funding, to assist with scheme viability and delivery, which can be problematic on more challenging brownfield sites such as this.
Given the longstanding concern that this site, a logical brownfield redevelopment opportunity in a highly sustainable and accessible town centre location, has not come forward, the Neighbourhood Plan has sought to positively address this through the exploration of realistic and deliverable mechanisms to facilitate its regeneration. Notwithstanding these efforts, repeated attempts by the qualifying body to engage directly with Central Bedfordshire Council in advance of the Regulation 14 stage were unsuccessful, evidenced through the accompanying Consultation Statement.
The Pre-submission version of the Plan did proceed to propose this policy as a site allocation for up to 151 homes with community and town centre uses, using the Regulation 14 process seek a meaningful response from CBC in its role as the landowner. It also used this process to seek buy-in from the community that, notwithstanding the long-held aspiration to see the site transformed as a community and cultural hub for the Town, the commercial reality is that the site needs to include a significant level of residential development to enable that vision to be realised, borne out by the viability work. Whilst a small number of respondents to the Regulation 14 did raise concern there appeared to be an overall acceptance for a residential led mixed use scheme. The trade-off for this acceptance being that re-development of the site would include some suitable space(s) for community and cultural uses as well as commercial spaces suitable for local small businesses at affordable rents and a similar amount of public parking provision as is currently required, unless this can be appropriately re-provided elsewhere within the town centre.
CBC, in their role as landowner, through their appointed consultants responded to the Regulation 14 and did not agree with the allocation of the site in this way, considering it to be overly prescriptive. A meeting was requested following the conclusion of the Regulation 14 to resolve the objection but was not forthcoming. As such, in order to move the neighbourhood plan forward, a revised policy wording, removing the allocation but retaining the desired site-specific development principles was sent to CBCs consultants for review. This also returned an objection (set out in the Consultation Statement.) The Steering Group reviewed the objection and considered any further proposed changes to the wording to accommodate their concern as the land interest, resulting in Policy LL5 as presented.
To see the full Leighton-Linslade Neighbourhood Plan Policy Map, or to find instructions about how to use our interactive maps, please visit our Policy Map page.