28/10/2026
The threat posed by the current draft of the Local Plan is so serious that BDRA took the decision to engage a professional traffic consultant to contribute to the overall BDRA\BAG response to the Regulation 19 consultation. They had done the same with the withdrawn Local Plan.
The consultant, who has worked on many Local Plans, was shocked by the quality of the work carried out by Basildon and its consultants.
Firstly, the spatial strategy was pre-determined. Plan Makers are supposed to use traffic evidence to inform their spatial strategy, testing various reasonable alternative growth scenarios in order to determine the most appropriate strategy.
This has not happened here, the consultant’s report showed that Basildon’s spatial strategy was clearly decided upon first – ie a strategy to channel half the borough’s Green Belt housing to Billericay – and then carry out an analysis of its impacts.
The report also showed that the analysis of the impact of the planned growth was pathetically weak; being inadequately detailed for the scale of growth proposed, inadequately detailed to allow proper auditing and failing to demonstrate that growth could occur without unacceptable impacts.
Only a small number of Billericay junctions were modelled and no mitigation was proposed for the impacts. Worse still these junctions seem to have been chosen at random – the key junctions at and around the Sun Corner crossroads were not modelled at all.
The Council’s evidence base was also silent on the strategic road network, there was nothing on the A127, A12, A13 or M25. Since then, we have heard that the very limited improvements the government had in mind for these roads have been cancelled.
We intend to use the consultant throughout the Local Plan examination process.
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