Sarah Williams – Chair of Great Houghton Parish Council – Speech for Planning Inquiry
Great Houghton Parish Council submitted a formal objection to this application, prepared by our planning consultants and it has been carried forward against this appeal.
However, I have listened to some of the evidence given and looked through our objection and I feel that given that our response was prepared by a professional, the voice of our residents has been slightly lost. I feel that given that this development would affect them the most, that their voice should be heard in addition to the formal objection. The Great Houghton Neighbourhood Development Plan (“GHNDP”) was also referred to in that objection but was then in draft form. It was passed in 2022, with a 93% yes vote.
There are 4 areas which I want to address.
1. Conservation Area
• When speaking about the Conservation Area, there has been a significant emphasis placed on the Church. Although it is listed and that is the principal building of note, the Conservation Area covers much of the lower half of the village and continues down the High Street on the left-hand side (encompassing the buildings of the old school).
• I am not sure what documents you have seen as the bundles are large, but the Great Houghton Conservation Area Appraisal and Management Plan 2018 contains an aerial photo (at page 8) showing the position of the Conservation Area and its proximity to the site. It’s roughly a school playing field and another similar field plus the A428 – it’s fairly close.
• GHNDP Policy 1 – “Protecting Village Character and the Rural Environment” states at (b) that proposals should at “take into account and be sensitive to the significance and the setting of the Great Houghton Conservation Area….” i.e. not just the Church or the Conservation Area but the setting in which that subsists.
• As set out in our formal objection, the Conservation Area is a designated heritage asset and our opinion is that this would have a significant negative impact on that setting.
• On behalf of the residents of the houses at the bottom of the High Street – which are not be in the Conservation Area, but we also represent them – as the houses on the right hand side of the High Street as you go down it go down further towards the A428 junction (further than the Conservation Area and can be seen as you turn in from the A428) they will be very close to this development (or at least the trees and bunding intended to disguise it).
2. Brackmills and employment benefit
• This development has been characterised as an addition to Brackmills, but no part of Brackmills is on the North side of the Bedford Road; it is confined within its specific site on the South side. The development on the northern side of the road from the Barnes Meadow Roundabout is not Brackmills, it is the Lakes – office space not industrial space.
• In terms of practicalities, although on a map the site of this development is opposite the old Cattlemarket/Dachser/Decathlon sites, to access those areas by foot you have to cross the A428 (and there have been fatalities crossing that road) and get through the line of hedgerow opposite. By car, that part of Brackmills is not accessed via the roundabout at the public house – instead you go further into Brackmills where there is another roundabout constructed when those units were built to provide access and the road off that roundabout loops back round to that end of the site.
• So, Brackmills is not easily accessible from the proposed development site; practically speaking it is separated from Brackmills because it is bisected by the A428.
• The proposed development would also extend the line where Brackmills ends, because the last Brackmills building finishes midway down the side of this development which then carries on to the Great Houghton turn. It would therefore represent an encroachment of the line of development beyond Brackmills.
• As set out in our objection, this site is not allocated for development in Local Plan Part 2.
• Industrial jobs are generally low paid manual work; similar jobs are available within Brackmills. It’s not particularly scientific, but I carried out an internet search yesterday on Totaljobs.com, with the search parameters being jobs in Brackmills, with a radius of 0 miles. This produces a list of 241 jobs. The latter part of that list this includes jobs in the East Midlands; but after omitting any which don’t state they are in Brackmills or have an NN4 postcode it still produces 62 jobs. There is also vacant industrial and office space within Brackmills (again, not scientific, but a search yesterday on Rightmove Commercial yields 22 results (admittedly this includes a field in Great Houghton and some duplicates, but there is some space).
3. Traffic
A428 Junction
• The junction between the A428 and Great Houghton High Street is dangerous. During the time I have lived in the village there have been 2 fatalities at the Great Houghton junction. One was a young man from the village who I understand got off the bus from town (on the opposite side of the road) and was killed as he crossed the road. The second was a motorcyclist turning into the junction who was hit by a car which did not see him. I think there may also have been a serious accident/fatality at the Little Houghton turn involving a car roughly last year.
• Any additional traffic on the A428 increases the issues it already has and makes the turn right onto the A428 from our village more difficult and so dangerous for villagers. Further development means further traffic.
High Street
• Although the A428 would be the principal route to this development, I need to mention our High Street. It’s busy – we have a speed camera which counts car use and this shows over 1,200 trips per day. It is also used as a rat run by those cutting across from Newport Pagnell road to the Bedford Road. If the A45/M1 is blocked for any reason, drivers also use that route (some sent that way by their sat navs as a route avoiding those problems). It produces additional queuing at the A428 junction (the junction routinely produces small queues as those waiting to turn right after two or three car lengths prevent cars from using the left-hand lane to turn into Northampton). Due to problems on the M1/A45, we have had 2 instances of a gridlocked queue to the top of the village since August.
• The road is also unsuitable for HGVs (I have seen them doing a 3-point turn at the pub) and we have informal HGV restriction signs from WNC.
• Put simply we don’t want any additional traffic down the High Street, for example, by employees or customers traveling to and from this site.
• These issues are reflected in policies 1 and 9 of GHNDP which deal with the mitigation of additional traffic generated by developments.
Truck layby
• Since the construction of the Dachser/Decathlon buildings, HGVs are frequently parked in the layby by drivers on tachograph breaks and particularly overnight; the lorries are unsightly and they also create significant rubbish; we have had to call WNC because the bins are overflowing and the litter flies also away.
• The layby is opposite the development and so lorries delivering to the that development may use it.
4. Loss of the Separation of the village from urban Northampton
Lastly, I wanted to address the largest problem, the loss of the separation of Great Houghton from urban Northampton.
GHNDP Objective 4 notes that “the neighbourhood area is…valued for the surrounding local countryside…it provides valuable separation between the villages and the Northampton urban area; it separates the villages and helps retain their separate identities; and it is valued for the visual and other qualities of the local landscape.
GHNDP Policy 6 “Conserving and Enhancing the Landscape” goes on to state at (f) that “new development should conserve or enhance the local landscape by…[S]seek[ing] to minimise the encroachment of development into visually exposed landscapes and where development is proposed on the edge of the village, it enhances views of the settlement edge from the surrounding countryside and does not lead to inappropriate incursion into the surrounding countryside by reason of its siting, design, materials or use of landscaping,
GHNDP Policy 1 – “Protecting Village Character and the Rural Environment” states at c) that development should “take into consideration and be sympathetic to the surrounding rural landscape and sensitive to the existing small-scale residential development within Great Houghton”.
And finally with respect to the neighbourhood plan, GHNDP3 – “Sustainable Design and Construction” states that development should be “sympathetic to local design features” and that “development will not be supported where it is of poor design that has an adverse impact on the character of the area”.
As set out in our formal objection we feel that the proposed development breaches the GHNDP.
The semi-rural setting of our village is part of what gives the village its character, local distinctiveness, and sense of place.
It’s also important to our residents. A developer intends to apply to put 800 houses at the top of the village and recently held the consultations for that scheme. I stayed for the first day and listened to what our villagers said. The semi-rural feel and separate identity of the village came at the top of their list of priorities. They also made this clear in questionnaires sent out regarding the Design Statement prepared in 2019 (this is noted in GHNDP, which utilises those answers as part of its evidence base).
This parcel of land is the last remaining separation between our village and the urban area of Northampton. This development would significantly encroach on our village, closes the gap between Great Houghton and the urban area of Northampton and affects the separate nature and semi-rural feel which is an intrinsic part of its setting and which our residents value. There is also a natural incongruity between a village which has grown up piecemeal over a thousand years with a light industrial estate and also with the planting and bunding used to disguise it, compromising the efficacity of the proposed mitigation measures.
It’s not just our village. This land is effectively the gateway to Northampton – it is the first view of the Northampton as you approach it from Bedford, especially as the road is set higher until the Little Houghton turn; as you go past that turn, you overlook the site. It’s going to be obvious and visually intrusive from that point on the A428, from Little Houghton and in close up from our village.
The word “sensitive” is used to describe the site. It is sensitive because of its role in retaining the separate identity which it affords our village and which is part of our character and because it is the visual gateway to Northampton.
For us, it is manifestly the wrong type of development on the wrong site.
Sarah Williams
23.11.2023