Bedford Mayor Dave Hodgson has been slammed for trying to deflect criticism of his flawed Local Plan.
Concerns have been raised around the direction of the Council’s Local Plan, allocating sites for the development of around 8000 homes to the year 2035, following the collapse of the Mayor’s preferred option for thousands of homes at the proposed Colworth ‘Garden Village’; a green field site next to Sharnbrook and Souldrop.
The Colworth settlement would have contributed 2500 homes to the Local Plan housing target, possibly expanding to 4500 thereafter, but the Mayor has now accepted that it cannot proceed after the site promotors failed to reach an agreement over noise mitigations with the owners of the adjacent Santa Pod Raceway.
The Mayor subsequently suggested that the question of whether other areas will now be expected to absorb the 2500 homes from Colworth was ‘shameless political scaremongering’. Cllr Alison Foster has hit out at this statement in a letter this week to the Times & Citizen, reproduced below:
The irony was not lost on me when Mayor Hodgson labelled criticism of his flawed Local Plan as ‘shameless political scaremongering’. Mayor Hodgson is the king of shameless political scaremongering; just look back at past editions of Times & Citizen for evidence.
Concerns around the implications for our villages arising from the collapse of his proposed ‘Garden Village’ at Colworth are entirely legitimate. The failure to secure Colworth, a wholly inappropriate site in the first place, means that 2500 homes now have to go elsewhere.
In 2017, Mayor Hodgson consulted on sites for 600 homes in Sharnbrook, 500 in Wilstead and 500 adjacent to Renhold. Is it ‘scaremongering’ to question whether he will rely on these sites again? The other option, to shorten the Local Plan period to 2030, meaning the Borough Council will have to plan for fewer homes in the short term whilst accepting many more going forward into the next Local Plan, is a complete failure of leadership and strategy.
If Mayor Hodgson wants to see an example of ‘shameless’ then he should look closer to home. The Liberal Democrats are currently publicising the Mayor's petition against sites put forward by landowners, at his invitation, for 9000 homes to the south of Bedford. This is remarkable given that he is petitioning the individual responsible for allocating sites for housing, who just happens to be himself. This is embarrassing and desperate.
Mayor Hodgson has kept very quiet about the fact that he signed the Borough up, without consultation with councillors, to the proposals for the Oxford – Cambridge Arc. This comprises a million new homes around infrastructure connecting the Arc, including the A421 to the south of Bedford. I will leave readers to draw their own conclusions as to who is guilty of shameless political scaremongering.