brentwood.gov.uk

The Spacial Strategy proposed here is utterly unsound for multiple reasons.

Firstly, about 5% of the Borough of Brentwood is South of the A127, yet the council proposed to build 4080 houses there (3500 in Dunton Hills Garden Village and 580 in West Horndon) This is more than 50% of the assessed need for housing.

The area South of the A127 is not well connected to the rest of the Borough due to the poor road connections via Ingrave, Herongate and Warley.

Development South of the A127 will not be effective in meeting the housing needs for the rest of the borough which will be undersupplied with affordable and specialised housing.

Development South of the A127 will do little of alleviate the high cost of housing in central and Northern Brentwood.

Brentwood Council accepts a need for 7,600 homes throughout the borough. Basildon has a need for about 20,000 and Thurrock a need for 32,000 which will be accomodated therein. It is therefore unhelpful of Brentwood to add to the development close to Basildon and Thurrock instead of meeting its own needs further North.

Central government has invested billions of pounds in transport infrastructure along the A12 corridor including Crossrail and the widening of the A12. This would not have been done if it was not expected to increase transport capacity around Brentwood. They will rightly expect this to unlock housing development along this corridor, not the A127 corridor as proposed in this spacial strategy. The few thousand home proposed along the A12 corridor is insufficient to meet this expectation.

Brentwood Council may argue that concentrating development in a new garden village will make it easier to raise funding for infrastructure. However, the A127 is already known to have been heavily underfunded since it was detrunked in 1997. It is of a low standard for the existing traffic and will suffer from further increases. No funding has been proposed on a the scale necessary to mitigate the load from further development, and even if funding were arranged improvements could not be implemented in the timescale of development for the current local plan.