The 2050 Local Plan for Milton Keynes will be adopted in late 2025 following the final round of consultation. Milton Keynes and the original layout is pretty much bulit out.
Therefore, the scope to pressure ‘the powers that be’ is limited. Our strategy going forward was reviewed in mid 2025 and we are considering a number of options. These deliberations will be completed by the Autumn.
Ten years ago, 89,801 people voted in favour of the Central Milton Keynes Business Neighbourhood Plan. Only 17,133 voted against. The plan was unique because electors in every MK postcode were allowed to vote because of the significance of the central area, as were – also uniquely – all businesses. Of these, 356 voted in favour with 47 against.
The government had instigated, heavily promoted and financially supported Neighbourhood Plans under The Localism Act 2011. CMK’s was given £20,000 and the referendum was a public cost too.
The CMK plan was one of eight government ‘frontrunners’. It was the first to go to referendum and was hailed a success. The government, it seemed, was fully committed to Neighbourhood Plans.
It has now been proved that Neighbourhood Plans were nothing but a sleight of hand. The thinking, clearly, was to pretend that government both national and local cared about local people’s protests to adverse planning decisions and wanted to show voters that they had a way to hear those voices.
Since 2011, thousands of groups of people across the country and – more particularly for this column – in Milton Keynes have invested considerable time and money in preparing Neighbourhood Plans. I was asked to take part in one several years ago but declined because, as you might imagine, I thought it was simply a cynical exercise in perception management.
Sadly, I have been proved right.
Local councils, including Milton Keynes City Council, have in the intervening years ridden roughshod over Neighbourhood Plans. Now, finally, central government has found a way to render them
totally meaningless.
Bow Brickhill spent months developing a meaningful Neighbourhood Plan, aiming for sustainable growth of over 25%.
“We secured a grant of about £12,000,” Alan Preen, one of the plan’s fathers, told me. “I attended a residential course in Oxford, and a group of committed residents dedicated months to debating issues, consulting with others, and preparing the plan for adoption.
“This process cost thousands of pounds and countless hours of effort. Now multiply that effort across the country and ask yourself why there is no funding for proper infrastructure.
“Toward the end of the process, architect David Lock called me as chair and told me what would happen to Bow Brickhill. Essentially, our Neighbourhood Plan would be ignored in favour of building several thousand houses and an out-of-village commercial centre.
“Local involvement? Completely disregarded. His message was clear: ‘Don’t waste your time.’”
Alan took the issue to full council. “I dramatically ripped up the plan in front of the councillors and threw it across the floor. That moment exposed the scandal of Milton Keynes’ developers allegedly engaging in “land banking” rather than building much-needed new homes.
“The chair suspended the sitting, effectively ending Bow Brickhill’s democratic voice in Neighbourhood Planning.”
Since then, Bow Brickhill has seen Blind Pond Farm built out with 30 new homes (around six being affordable) that the village supported, followed by a dozen houses opposite, another dozen near Greenways, and over 40 homes currently under construction by Croudace. The population of the village is nearly doubling, with the same infrastructure trying to support it all – except for its Community Hall which the community raised the money for and took the initiative to build.
There are plans for another 2,500 houses between Bow Brickhill and Woburn Sands. It is distinctly possible that Bow Brickhill station will closed in favour of Woburn Sands station, which is being relocated (another scandal), despite Bow Brickhill being the most popular thanks largely to Red Bull staff and children commuting to Bedford.
The fiasco with the railway bridge on V10 Brickhill Street (written about here in previous columns) continues, an example of incredibly poor planning, lack of money, the left hand not knowing what the right is doing and developers trying every which way to fudge a solution and get on and make profit.
“What we are left with is an unsustainable mess: sewers flowing into homes, subsiding land due to neglected ditches and no one taking responsibility,” says Alan. “Meanwhile, it is nearly impossible to get an appointment at the doctor, the roads are riddled with potholes and enormous logistics warehouses remain vacant after two years.
“Heavy rains turn the logistics estate into a wading bird sanctuary due to poor water management and, yes, sewage backs up too. But don’t worry—someone has told someone else and apparently, it’s “not a problem.”
As a world-class cynic this is exactly what I expected would happen but it is still shocking quite how blatant it all is. This is happening not just here but across the country and now, following the current government’s 2025 spending review, ministers have withdrawn all support for Neighbourhood Planning for 2025 onwards.
This includes all new applications. This also includes both the support they provide to community groups (including town and parish councils) preparing or reviewing neighbourhood plans and local authorities to cover referendum and examination costs and so on.
So, it seems that we will not see more easily-deluded voters thinking that their voice in local planning matters carries any weight. In the meantime, I understand that the Society of Local Council Clerks and the National Association of Local Councils are working on updates and further information regarding the future of neighbourhood planning support.
We have all been tricked since 2011. Now the curtain has finally been pulled back by Dorothy (oops, I mean Chancellor Rachel Reeves) and we can see the man pretending to be The Wizard of Oz.
Does he look like a building developer / land banker to you too?
Cheerio.
The first time I visited California I realised that the Americans were smarter than us Brits in one very particular way. They truly value convenience. Nothing must stand in its way.
Supermarkets must stay open 24 hours a day. Parking must be free, even in limited space car parks where it was necessary to get a shop – any shop – to stamp your card. If there was deal by a company whose goods were stocked at a supermarket, rather than by the supermarket itself, you were told about it automatically at the till.
I recall buying two bottles of potentially “emergency water” for a short trip to the Anza-Borrego Desert with its 600,000 acres of diverse desert terrain, a desert so hot in late August that it was like standing in front of a hairdryer on full blast, whilst the roads were covered with basking snakes.
As I got to the cashier with my two bottles of a particular brand, she said: “I think there’s a two for one offer on those”. She pulled out a page of a newspaper with hundreds of offers, cut out the right one and let me pay for just one bottle.
Can you imagine Tesco, Asda or Sainsbury’s doing that? No, me neither.
This lack of any sense of the necessity of convenience often strikes me here in Milton Keynes. Milton Keynes City Council has recently found new ways to strip out further convenience from our lives.
Suddenly expecting more than one green bin to be collected without incurring an additional fee is no longer an option, despite rises in everybody’s council tax and regardless of the size of your garden.
This move by the council follows other recent slaps in our faces such as having to make an appointment to drive to the tip and to never be allowed to use a trailer or van should you have one.
Not only does the council fail to understand and respect the needs of its citizens; it appears to go out of its way to hurt them both financially and emotionally.
You would think, wouldn’t you, that MKCC’s mission would be to improve the lives of its citizens. It would, you’d imagine, revere and respect the original principles for this city that made it different from and much more user-friendly than virtually everywhere else.
These principles were so clever that the original plans for Milton Keynes have been copied all over the world from Africa to Canada and beyond.
You would hope that MKCC would literally do everything in its power to preserve such elements as 1km grid squares with their own workplaces and shops to avoid a morning and evening ‘rush hour’ to the centre, that they would champion new redways, new grid roads, new grade-separated crossings, reasonable-cost parking where it is absolutely necessary to charge anything.
But no. MKCC is proving itself to be, quite literally, the enemy of its citizenry.
I wonder whether the council has already damaged trade at centre:mk with parking charges and strict ticketing routines. I am willing to bet that the centre would be busier and more successful if parking was still free as it is at other major shopping centres countrywide such as at eight of the biggest shopping centres in the UK:
Meanwhile, Milton Keynes City Council has announced plans to remove the last vestige of free parking in central Milton Keynes.
Shortly before you will read this column, a deadline of April 24, 2025, will have passed by which time MKCC will have sought public input via a statutory consultation – input that I can absolutely be certain will be ignored.
It was seeking our views on separate Traffic Regulation Orders to remove all existing car share parking places and free and limited waiting parking places in Central Milton Keynes, replacing each with standard and premium tariff parking places.
“The proposal is based on the results of the Council’s Strategic Review of Parking, a citywide initiative designed to assess parking pressures and to identify areas where parking controls would help to alleviate those pressures,” the council said in its Official Statement of Reasons.
“The proposal aims to manage parking availability and usage to the benefit of residents, businesses and their visitors. This will be achieved by the alteration of a combination of parking restrictions and parking places.”
So it is all for my benefit. Silly me, how could I not see that? How funny, that increased revenue from fees and fines does not get even a mention.
For those of us still able to park for free near the market, for instance, it will be the end of an era. The anti-convenience brigade at MKCC will have one more notch in their belts of pain, one more slap in the face for its citizens, one more way to fine and penalise us all.
And to think that MKCC has its own carpark, right in the heart of CMK and entirely free for councillors. What a happy coincidence.
Cheerio.
A blast from the past and a starring role for Theo, our Chair. This was published in October 2008.
Urban Eden is a group dedicated to promoting continued sustainable urban development in the new city of Milton Keynes in the face of decisions being taken by an enelected minority determined to ignore the wishes of those who live and work there. This video is designed to spread the word and support the group’s aims.
Happy new year… and let us hope that 2025 brings clear thinking to Milton Keynes City Council’s expansion policies for MK. I am not holding my breath, however.
In October’s column, I discussed the council’s 12-week consultation on the new MK City Plan 2050, set to take over from the disappointing Plan:MK. I opined on MKCC’s apparent new obsession; simply to save money on providing land for parking spaces, grid roads and redways in all new developments by forcing residents to walk everywhere.
This, it was claimed, is nothing to do with dense infill and a grotesque unwillingness to provide those proper parking spaces, grid roads and redways that we all love but to provide a new transport system to improve the health of MK residents.
“If everyone in MK did an extra ten minutes of walking each day over ten years, it could save the NHS £35million.”
I am surprised that new houses in MK are allowed to have heating systems and residents are not forced to go and chop down trees to burn in order to exercise.
But the council did not stop there. It promised to “focus on integrating new development with high-quality public transport provision, with a new Mass Rapid Transit System at its heart”.
I did not believe this for one minute.
“What do you think this so-called Mass Transit System will be? Monorail?,” I wrote. “Er, no. An actual free gift of one was rejected tens of years ago.
“Underground railways? Er, no. Far too expensive and clearly far-too good for the likes of us.
“Trams? Er, no. They need infrastructure and no one at the council will push for that.
“Buses, perhaps? Yes, you got it in one. We will get more horrible, unreliable, stuck in traffic, endlessly circuitous buses taking hours out of our lives.”
And I was right, despite what the council and others are claiming. The Citizen newspaper has recently reported that “More than 50 years after the idea was first suggested, a tram system is finally on the cards for Milton Keynes”.
Except it is not. It is a series of new buses, exactly as I predicted.
As I write, the council is soliciting responses from residents through Commonplace Digital Ltd, a private company based in Manchester which claims to “connect you to the people who create the places where you live, work and play. A platform to speak and be heard by developers, councils, and public bodies to initiate better decisions and places for all.”
It ran an online survey for four weeks. It ended on December 20 so, sadly, it will be over by the time you read this.
“We are seeking your feedback on how you travel and why you make the travel choices that you do for a range of different journeys. This is for our transport plan, which is called the LTP (Local Transport Plan) and this will be the fifth one the council has produced. It sets out our transport policies about buses, walking, cycling, scooting and driving for the next few years, and must respond to our climate and health challenges while at the same time supporting the growth of the city.”
They add: “Although we have not yet confirmed the fleet itself, we have started engaging with providers to identify a fleet that would provide the look and feel of a tram.”.
Surely the “look and feel of a tram” is something that runs on dedicated rails, that cannot simply disappear to do other things in other places like buses do and is not a glorified, misnamed bus.
When I took part in the survey, not all the buttons worked and I could only make comments rather than respond to some of the choices.
They asked questions about how I travelled in MK right now. One of the suggested options to select was ‘Tube’. Great job, Commonplace Digital Ltd.
I filled in the comment box asking them where are the Tube lines in MK as I appear to have completely missed them.
Almost unbelievably, they also claimed as one of their achievable goals “Reduced Journey Times: Faster, more efficient routes across Milton Keynes – up to one-third or up to 15 minutes faster than today’s equivalent bus journey for a typical journey from suburb to centre.”.
Really, despite not having identified the vehicles, they have got a bus that goes magically faster than a bus. If any time savings can be made with buses, make them on MK’s current buses.
Meanwhile why, oh why, can we not have houses with sufficient parking spaces (where people can plug in their zero pollution electric cars), redways for cyclists and pedestrians, grid roads with not ‘at-grade’ crossings, no unnecessary traffic lights and please, please, please a proper mass transit system?
Is MKCC deliberately trying to destroy this wonder, this zenith, this pinnacle of post-war town planning?
The population of the city of Milton Keynes is due to rise from about 265,000 to well over 410,000 by 2050. The city of Lille in France had a population of 236,234 in 2020 and has a Metro (underground transport) network of 45km with 60 stations. Lille also has a public tram system with 36 stations.
So how, I ask, is it possible for a little French city like Lille – and it is not alone in this – to have both a large underground railway system and a large tram system.
The question is this: When is a bus a tram? And I think I have the answer. It is as soon as my car is a helicopter travelling inside Milton Keynes’ famous underground transport network…
Until then, it is a bus. Happy tramming until then, one and all.
Cheerio.