This week, Nimby Watch is in Bushey, a town near Watford that’s been around since the Domesday Book…
I see we’re in Watford. What brings us here, then? Hang on for a second, we’re in Bushey – it’s been its own town for 1,000 years, which is long enough that we shouldn’t just smush it in with the nearest city.
Well, what I do know about Bushey is that it’s inside the M25, which means it’s right on the edge of the green belt. You want to build homes on the green belt again, don’t you? Well…yes. But hear me out! The development here is genuinely a pretty unusual one: it’s a plan for an ‘intergenerational’ estate, specifically aimed at helping older adults live independently.
The idea is to create a big, walkable estate with a lot of homes targeted at different groups of older adults. Some are aimed at downsizers, who still live independently, but who might appreciate a home on one floor with accessibility features to help them as they get older. Other homes are then aimed at people who need assisted living support. There’s then space for not-for-profit services, health centres and other facilities.
That sounds a lot like those fancy care homes you see in cosy crime shows – isn’t ‘The Thursday Murder Club’ set in one of those? Pretty much, yes, though the idea is that this is for people to live relatively (or completely) independently, rather than being a home for people who need round-the-clock care.
There’s a step beyond that, too. There are homes aimed at families and younger workers as well – the idea is that you don’t want to be cut off from wider society just because you’ve turned 65, so housing for older adults is deliberately sited in a walkable neighbourhood with working-age people and kids, too.
You’re giving this a very strong sell, which really makes me think there’s a trap here. Is it getting built on sacred ground, or something? All this walkability and intergenerational living sounds expensive – I bet there’s no affordable housing, right? I’ll have you know that the development plans have 40% affordable housing – the hope, according to the developers, is that at least some of the care workers and medical staff working on the site could live there, too. But there’d be the usual key worker housing provision, all of that stuff, too.
Now, the site is technically green belt, but–
I KNEW IT. What are you bulldozing this time? Pristine meadows? A wildlife reserve? Top-quality farmland? Well, if you’d just have let me finish, I could’ve told you: it’s a former landfill site. Useless for agriculture, and not exactly the most beautiful land around the town, either.
The fact the land is green belt is probably why the developers have gone so all-out to make sure the plans are so good, though. You still need to demonstrate ‘very special circumstances’ to get approval for projects on green belt. Bushey has an ageing population, this site doesn’t risk sprawl between Bushey and other nearby towns, and this is a distinctly unremarkable bit of green belt.
So, what’s the obstacle? Are we about to pile in on another poor, unsuspecting bunch of locals just trying to protect their beloved local former landfill site? Let me be clear: I would happily join a pile on against such a bunch of locals. But in this instance, the developers seem to have managed the near-impossible – they’ve won the locals over. There are around 300 objections to the plans, which were lodged in 2024 and which (naturally) are still under consideration, but there are more than 1,300 supportive comments, too.
Well, why have you dragged me out to Bushey, then? Are you just showing off? Does anyone actually object to this plan? Incredibly, yes, someone does: it’s National Highways.
Hang on, what?! Exactly. As if the UK Government didn’t already pay enough agencies to write letters to each other stopping anything happening, the highways people have got in on the act. Or as the agency has written to the council, asking for the development to be refused: ‘In the case of this proposed development, National Highways is interested in the potential impact that the development might have upon M1 J5 and J4.’
Well, no one likes a congested road. It’s the M1! If the M1 is a bottleneck on development, we’re never going to get anything built anywhere, are we? But more than that, building new homes doesn’t magically bring new people into existence. The living complex sounds lovely, but I’m not sure people will move across the country for it.
There also seems to be minimal thought going into this: this complex is being advertised for retirees more than working-age adults. Retirees generally don’t need to get onto the motorway at rush hour every day. Maybe, if we ever want to get anything done without taking years at a time, we should try to make it possible to build without a dozen or more agencies weighing in to each other about it?
Feeling better for getting that out of your system? I really am, thanks.
