Bourne Town Council
SK Community Point,
3 Abbey Road,

Bourne,

Lincolnshire

PE10 9EF

26th August 2025

Planning Policy Team
South Kesteven District Council
Council Offices
St. Peter’s Hill
Grantham NG31 6PZ

RE: Local Plan Consultation Regulation 18 – Proposed Housing and Mixed-Use Site Allocations 

Dear SKDC Planning Team,

We have carefully and thoroughly considered the proposed housing and mixed-use site allocations. While we find ourselves broadly agreeing with many of the proposals, Bourne Town Council formally objects to the inclusion of Site SKPR-7 within the emerging Local Plan. We believe Site SKPR-60 is a far more suitable site and offers a similar number of potential dwellings while remaining within the council’s own dwelling density rules. We set out below the grounds for our objection, drawn both from the Council’s own assessments and the lived experience of our community. For your convenience, we also include an appendix summarising our position, as well as a completed response form as a separate document.

1. Scale and Transparency
   Site SKPR-7 is considerably larger than the original proposal presented by representatives of the SKDC Cabinet. We believed that SKPR-7 was the proposed Barratt-Redrow development. On closer inspection, the proposed allocation is far larger than this and plans urban sprawl along a significant stretch of Bourne’s established South Western boundary. This discrepancy raises concerns about the transparency of the consultation process and whether residents are being adequately informed.
2. Existing Development Pressure
   The consultation fails to adequately account for the more than 3,000 properties delivered at Elsea Park — a development already exceeding original expectations by over 1,000 dwellings. The town’s infrastructure and services are under pressure, and this must be recognised in site selection. SKPR-7 will, in effect, become an extension of the already very dense Elsea Park Development.
3. Unjustified Rejection of SKPR-60
   No reasons have been published for rejecting SKPR-60, despite its advantages over SKPR-7. SKPR-60 benefits from existing road access, adjacency to commercial uses (which in fact buffer the development from the nearby woodlands – as does the existing road!), and the absence of contaminated land. Unlike SKPR-7, it is deliverable within 0–5 years rather than 5–10 years. Your own assessments confirm that SKPR-60 has only minor impacts on highways networks, whereas SKPR-7 is assessed as having moderate impacts and unsuitable access.
4. Traffic and Highways
   The A15 already carries excessive traffic, particularly when acting as the diversion route when the A1 is closed. Locating development at SKPR-7, which would introduce further traffic at a blind bend on a hill in a national speed limit zone, is fundamentally unsafe. It will require significant and sub-optimal mitigation to make access barely viable. SKPR-60, by contrast, is acknowledged by your own assessments to have only a minor impact on highways.
5. Listed Building Clarity
   Your assessment identifies a listed building within 500m of SKPR-60. Bourne Town Council identifies this as the Chapel in the cemetery. This appears to be over 700m away in a straight line, is behind the gates of the cemetery, on the other side of the road and in another part of the town past three residential developments, a supermarket, and a traffic-light controlled junction. This should not be a reason to discount the site.
6. Unsustainable Development
   SKPR-7 fails basic sustainability tests. Residents would be cut off from key amenities — schools, shops, surgeries, places of worship, and bus stops — without the use of a car. Public transport in Bourne is limited given the population of the town, and can be unreliable, particularly after 6pm and at weekends. This site therefore promotes unsustainable car-dependent development, contrary to local and national planning objectives [NPPF para. 105–106].
7. Neighbourhood Plan Evidence
   The Bourne Neighbourhood Plan team, supported by survey evidence, has consistently shown that residents favour growth to the east of the town. This evidence must be given significant weight in decision-making [NPPF para. 29].
8. Preferred Alternatives
   Allocating SKPR-60, SKPR-83, SKPR-99, SKPR-84 and SKPR-53 at an average density of 35 dwellings per hectare would deliver approximately 1,957 homes — comfortably exceeding Bourne’s allocation of 1,037 homes. Like SKPR-7, these sites will require highway improvements, but they will better align with community preferences and sustainability principles.
9. Comparative Assessment
   On deliverability, highways impact, access, contaminated land, wildlife proximity, and medical access, SKPR-7 consistently performs worse than SKPR-60. Yet SKPR-7 is being promoted without adequate justification.
10. Consultation Oversight
    SKPR-60 has no information listed under the “Findings” section of your consultation materials. SKPR-7 also lacks summary comments at the bottom of the analysis. This omission made it significantly harder for residents to assess the site in good faith. This omission prevents us from scrutinising your reasons for rejecting the site. Indeed, there do not appear to be any discrete reasons for rejecting SKPR-60. Given the purpose of this consultation, we view this as a serious procedural failing. SKPR-60 is not even included on the portal – we only know about it thanks to members of SKDC who also sit on Bourne Town Council.

Finally, the eleventh hour decision to include site SKPR-7 was not in the spirit of cooperation and agreement which came about in the face of the strength of local opinion opposing the choice of sites by SKDC in the last Local Plan. We therefore reiterate that position here: Bourne Town Council and the Bourne Parish Neighbourhood Planning Team must be meaningfully consulted prior to strategic decisions about the future of Bourne. For SKDC to simply impose a direction of development without such consultation exposes a significant democratic deficit and a concerning attitude to engagement.

For all these reasons, Bourne Town Council strongly objects to the allocation of SKPR-7 and considers that SKPR-60 represents a more suitable, deliverable, and sustainable option.

Yours faithfully,

Appendix B: Summary Table Consultation Response