Although the land lies over the border in Buckinghamshire, CPRE Bedfordshire has joined local residents in objecting to this development, which will have significant environmental, traffic and social impacts.

This is second time in recent years that the applicants have applied for a large housing development on the land concerned – in January 2012 a proposed scheme of 900 homes on the same site was rejected on Appeal by the Secretary of State. In this new application, for 300 homes, the applicants are relying heavily on the more recent (March 2012) National Planning Policy Framework's "presumption in favour of sustainable development". However, in our view this development, even though for a smaller number of homes, the impacts that it will have are still of a fundamentally unsustainable nature, and therefore the NPPF presumption should not apply.

These unsustainable impacts centre on the environmental damage caused to the attractive valley landscape that lies to the west of Linslade, and on the traffic and social impacts on the wider Leighton-Linslade urban area, where the road and community infrastructure is already set to come under severe pressure from the 2,500 homes of the East of Leighton-Linslade Urban Extension scheme, which received outline planning permission last autumn.