brentwood.gov.uk

remove the Dunton Hills Garden Village development. Add development along the A12 corridor instead.

Brentwood Council have justified concentrating their green belt development in Dunton Hills and West Horndon by saying that it will make it possible to fund infrastructure. The opposite is true. The amount of money that can be obtained from CIL can only pay for schools, health centres, flood mitigation and other normal requirements.

The A127 was de-trunked in 1997 and has since been underfunded by Essex County Council. It is now a very low quality road with numerous low quality side exits. The fortune of war roundabout which has remained an obstacle for decades is symptomatic of this failure along the whole route from Gallows Corner to Southend. It supports levels of traffic which anywhere else would justify a three lane motorway, yet only modest junction improvements have been proposed. With 90,000 new homes planned for South Essex it can only get a lot worse, yet nothing is on the horizon to sort it. Even if funding were to be made available it would take twenty years to plan and implement any major improvements.

The situation with the A12 which remained a national trunk route could not be more of a contrast. It is a high quality route with a high standard of junctions all along. Widening through Brentwood is already funded and planned for the near future. Much widening has already been done.

Brentwood should be looking to take advantage of these improvements which unlock housing development along the A12 corridor. Building a garden village at Dunton Hills will only make the problem there more acute over the next 20 years before anything can be put in place to upgrade the A127.

Other roads present similar problems. The A128 is a low quality congested road but Dunton Hills Garden Village will rely on it for residents heading South towards the Lower Thames Crossing or North towards Brentwood. If Dunton Hills is to provide the affordable housing required for the rest of Brentwood then a new major North-South bypass would be needed to replace the A128 and must be funded and planned for rapid construction. I do not believe this will happen. Development around the A12 corridor nearer to where the affordable housing is needed for teachers and other key workers in the area would not require this.

The same situation exists for rail networks. The C2C line in the South near Dunton is just one pair of tracks with one station in Brentwood Borough at West Horndon. The line through Brentwood has stations in Brentwood Town, Shenfield and Ingatestone. It has four tracks and incorporates the new Elizabeth Line for Crossrail. Brentwood Council seems happy to accept the benefit of this line for its existing affluent residents but it does not want to allow the huge investment in Crossrail to unlock the economic and housing development that its cost justifies.

Even with schools we see the same pattern. Brentwood wants to keep hold of its surplus of secondary schools around Brentwood Town, yet it does not want to welcome new families who could send their children there without long bus and train journeys from far away. The new school proposed for Dunton Hills will not materialise for many years if at all because the development is not big enough to justify it and schools in Brentwood will need to be filled by pupils travelling along the A128 from Dunton Hills to the Brentwood schools.

These considerations make the Dunton Hills development unsustainable in numerous respects described in the National Planning Policy Framework. The Plan is therefore unsound.