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.
I have written in Business MK before about the closure of the A509 London Road between J14 M1 and Tickford Roundabout on the A422 leading to Newport Pagnell, Olney and Bedford. The road has been closed since September 2023 except for access to the Holiday Inn hotel from J14.
In August 2023, Milton Keynes City Council announced that the A509 would reopen on September 27 2024. It is now March, some six months later, and it is still closed. It is no surprise that these new delays will cause more chaos for the beleaguered residents of Newport Pagnell.
Developers of the 461-hectares MK East site have failed to meet the reopening deadline but the council seems happy to issue wishy-washy apologies on their behalf. Cllr Lauren Townsend, cabinet member for public realm: “We appreciate that any long-term road closure causes inconvenience. The new development here will bring some 5,000 new properties to the area as well as employment land for businesses.”
She forgot to mention that there would be nowhere to park and nowhere to charge your electric car.
MKCC explains the reasons for the development’s more than 500 days’ delays as “bad weather and the sheer extent of the MK East project’s work”. It is worth noting that the development will include a new 63-hectare river valley park providing additional green space for residents. But many would claim that the developers cannot build on this additional land because of major flood risks, which might still be a problem elsewhere on the site.
Why does rain appear to continually stop play on this site? Is it genuinely fit to build on? Will these 5,000 new homes be at risk of flooding? I think we need to be properly informed.
Meanwhile, traffic is advised to use the official diversion via the V8 Marlborough Street on to H3 Monks Way. But it does not. Anyone with any sense uses the somewhat shorter V11 Tongwell Street and Willen Road crossing the M1, which is itself subjected to occasional but largely short-lived road closures as warehouses go up.
For those asking how MK East is coming on, new drone photos (viewable online) show the oh so slow development, including a new roundabout and a new road being built through the new estate. MK East appears to be the UK’s biggest muddy field and MKCC has let us down again, because the new access road servicing these 5,000 new homes is, it seems, a single carriageway. You would think MKCC would have learned its lesson from the planning disaster that is the laughably inadequate Countess Way extension of the H7 Chaffron Way.
The A509 might easily, for an increase in cost to the developers, have been kept open while MK East is built. If, as was claimed, it required a redesign of the road network, why was this not done before any building of the 5,000 new homes, a community hub, a primary school and local shops and employments zones?
While MP for Milton Keynes North, Ben Everitt questioned why the new access road was not built in advance of the A509 closure and said in the House of Commons when the MK East plan was announced: “Reckless over-expansion in rural areas is a real and pressing danger.
“My constituents who live in rural communities and market towns such as Olney and Newport Pagnell do not want and do not deserve to be swamped by poorly planned, sprawling housing developments.
“We need to make planning work better for people and their communities. We need to get back to those pure principles just as the visionaries who built Milton Keynes did.”
The Liberal Democrats on the council are protesting too, despite having voted in favour of the development which led to the road closures. Their leader Cllr Jane Carr said: “People are tired of this and they deserve better than continued delays and uncertainty. That is why, as the main opposition, Lib Dem councillors will continue to hold the Labour-led City Council to account ensuring the concerns of local people and businesses are heard.”
Talk, it seems, is cheap.
Even the Prime Minister discovered how easy it is to be blindsided by events when he came to the Holiday Inn on the A509 last month with television crews and journalists to lay a symbolic brick and boast about his plan to build thousands of homes in up to 100 new towns.
Sir Keir was met with a barricade of more than 40 tractors and very noisy horn-blowing farmers, protesting about Labour’s 20% inheritance tax proposals and allowing imports of allegedly sub-standard produce undercutting the UK’s own high-welfare produce.
Not only was the PM unable to deliver his planned media presentation and make his speech but also he could not leave the site in his fleet of blue-lit Range Rovers. Instead, an emergency helicopter was called to airlift him back to London where he reappeared in Downing Street still wearing his high-viz builder’s coat.
The developers of MK East are Berkeley St. James, Bloor Homes and MKCC itself, which still owns part of the land and which has built the school and the health centre. Both of these will not be open for years as there are no houses for patients or pupils to live in nor a finished road going to it so patients elsewhere – some of whom are crying out for registration at a doctors’ surgery – cannot access them.
I contacted the contractor Laing O’Rourke, which has blamed proximity to the River Ouzel and above long-term average rainfall for delays.
They list 65 projects on their web site including the new Everton FC stadium, Hinkley Point C nuclear power station, HS2, East West Rail and other projects from Sydney to Dubai… but no mention of MK East.
I spoke with the charming and helpful Kate Sharkey, who is on site somewhere in that huge muddy field. She seemed puzzled why the website does not list MK East but she assured me that the A509 will reopen sometime in August this year.
Will it, given that previous deadlines have been missed? Your guess is as good as mine.
Cheerio.
Well, it seems that we’ve all survived the chilling horrors of January and now must face those of February before we can even begin to think of Spring. Personally, I can’t wait for that northern hemisphere warming to kick in. However, in the meantime I have been looking at how recent trends in retail in MK and elsewhere are not only continuing but moving faster and faster.
Retail locations are generally considered to be in one of four groups. We have, in recent years, seen how Quaternary (4th tier) and Tertiary (3rd tier) locations have effectively completely died. Even charity shops are turning their noses up at free-rent locations where shoppers rarely go.
Now, it seems, even formerly very successful Secondary (2nd tier) retail locations are finished, too. Take Bletchley, for example.
Once Bletchley was one of Milton Keynes’ most successful retail locations with, over different periods, a thriving market, a large Sainsbury’s, a large Boots, a Co-Op department store over several floors, a W.H. Smiths, a Wilko’s and not one but two Poundlands – all now gone. More recently the main street, Queensway, has lost both its Barclays and its Lloyds banks and is home to mostly charity shops, nailbars, coffee bars and eateries selling things you mostly cannot get online. There is, however, still a busy Home Bargains, a Peacocks, and two successful butchers’ shops – Palmer’s and Meatworld – which are not only surviving but, in one case, expanding into otherwise emptying premises. Well done to them.
Bletchley’s flagship retail destination was, since its construction by the Milton Keynes Development Corporation in the 1970s, the Brunel Centre; a decent-sized purpose-built shopping centre. In recent years it has become more and more empty. The latest bad news for local shoppers is that both Farm Foods and Select Clothing are quitting.
The Brunel Centre is owned by the council’s wholly owned Milton Keynes Development Partnership which also owns the former Wilkinson’s site. The council also, separately, owns the former Sainsbury’s site and its car park. The council’s plan is to say goodbye to the last of the retail in Brunel Centre, including a Boots opticians, a Holland & Barrett, a Savers health, home and beauty store, a Card Factory, a Cex tech-swap store and a F. Hinds jewellery store and to redevelop the entire Brunel/Sainsbury’s/Wilkinson’s/Car park site as a high-density, high-rise housing development with hundreds of homes.
It is likely many will be used by commuters on the soon-to-be newly reestablished East West Rail between Oxford and Cambridge with its MK hub station in Bletchley.
However, we must ask ourselves whether we really want to see the end of every retail outlet that sells things that we might or could buy online, mostly at cheaper prices. Of course, it costs significantly more to run a store with all its rates, staffing, administration, heating, goods-stocking and security costs than a gigantic warehouse in the middle of nowhere mostly run by robots. This is an inevitability, I’m afraid, and one whose pace is accelerating more rapidly than anyone could have recently predicted.
Looking still further ahead, how long is it before Primary (1st tier) retail sites such as thecentre:mk and Midsummer Place are forced to convert every last shop to an eatery or bowling alley?
Cinema, of course, is also dead and no longer a reasonable option for the remaining giants of retail despite their ever-hopeful and oft-expressed wishes to use cinema to save their centres. Who needs to go to a cinema to see a film when the auditorium is full of noisy people using their phones (which even on silent give off a bright glow), chattering loudly and eating noisy sweets when you can buy a 75-inch TV for less than a grand, download films very soon after release, pause them to get a drink or to go to the loo, add subtitles if those Brooklyn accents are too hard to comprehend and rewind or fast forward at will? It really is no contest, is it?
Yes, an epic blockbuster on i-Max, particularly one in 3D, is still truly amazing. But my vote and the votes of many I know are now firmly going for home-viewing.
So, there we have it; the death of Quaternary, Tertiary and now even Secondary retail is assured. More and more shops will become homes, and the world will never be the same again, but at least it’s going to be getting warmer.
Cheerio.
P.S. Before anyone writes in, I acknowledge that Stony Stratford
is a special case. The town appears to be bucking the trends somewhat and is largely defying the inevitable, although not entirely comprehensively. I might be tempted to write about Stony in a forthcoming column.