The Elms Park development has been in gestation since 2016, much of it evolving away from the public eye with few opportunities for the public to help shape and improve the scheme. Such a huge scheme requires a vast amount of documentation, which in turn makes it more and more opaque.
As Grosvenor Estates found from its July 2019 survey of 2,000 members of the public, only 2% of people trust developers on planning for large-scale schemes, and only 7% trust councils. Evidence for both the causes and the effects of such widespread mistrust are provided by this Elms Park application.
“This application is a planning juggernaut”, said Andrew Booton, Chair of Cheltenham Civic Society. “With more than 400 documents and an officers’ report of some 125 pages, it is quite overwhelming to try to engage with it properly. The sheer size of it puts off most people from having their say and the complexity simply engenders their mistrust of what is being presented. It also does not help that the government’s current policy is so focused on delivering quantity rather than quality.
“When completed, Elms Park will be a massive dormitory satellite of Cheltenham, but it will be both reliant on and driving edge-of-town big box retail. This scheme is far too focused on its links with the M5 than its links with the town.
“Unfortunately, the developer’s thinking has not really moved on from their pre-climate-change, car-dependency development model, and their responses to the major shifts in planning policy since 2016 have been minimalistic.
“Critically, there does not appear to have been any proper consideration of what is in it for Cheltenham, as everything in this scheme is set to dilute the overall vitality, uniqueness and attraction of our town.
“There will be a huge increase in traffic generation – we can expect more than 20,000 new vehicle movements per day. The development will inevitably shift Cheltenham’s centre of gravity further westward to threaten the Green Belt – itself created to prevent the merger of Cheltenham and Gloucester.
“That continuing pressure will have the slow but inevitable impact of hollowing out and undermining our town centre, to the detriment of the whole town. But it looks like a juggernaut that no one can stop!”