Central Bedfordshire Council
Host authority. The parish of Tempsford sits here. Receives the largest precept share on shared-boundary length.
First footprint · draft 0.1
Tempsford interchange
A worked Charter Area at the proposed East West Rail / East Coast Main Line crossing — large enough to meet the Act, small enough to be a town rather than a slogan.
This is not a designation, a land bid, or a claim on the existing village. Figures are here so they can be attacked with a replacement number. A better first footprint must still clear the 500-hectare floor, name its neighbours, and carry a Forced Construction package.
- Working name
- Tempsford Charter Borough
- Status
- Working specification · draft 0.1 · not designated
- Statutory floor
- 500 hectares of brownfield, under-used corridor, or designated growth land
- Working area
- 1,200 hectares (about 2,965 acres) around the proposed interchange
- Developable (indicative)
- 920 hectares, with 280 hectares held as strategic open space and flood management
- Existing parish
- Tempsford village remains outside the Charter objects as a swallowed settlement
What the Town and Country Planning Act is already doing here
Tempsford is the intersection the growth corridor keeps naming and the planning system keeps deferring. A new East West Rail station is proposed where the line would meet the East Coast Main Line. Government new-town work has treated the area as a 40,000-home opportunity. Compact-town studies have drawn a 1,200-hectare heart with about 25,000 dwellings on 500 net residential hectares at roughly 50 dwellings per hectare.
None of that is a Charter. It is the existing machine: a local plan that put the strategic decision off to a later review; an infrastructure body still consulting on alignment; statutory consultees on flood, habitat, heritage, and trunk roads; and judicial review waiting behind each of those clocks. Capital can option land. It cannot buy a yes.
A Charter Borough does not invent the site. It changes the procedure on a defined footprint so that a Pattern Book street can start on a fourteen-day clock, while harm that crosses the fence stays strict liability and the neighbour is paid.
Neighbours
The Charter remits 12.5 percent of gross levy revenue every year, plus 10 percent of first freehold-alienation receipts, un-hypothecated. The working split is by length of shared boundary, published with the levy. A neighbour authority has standing on Article 12 and on environmental discharge that crosses the line. It does not sit as a second sovereign.
Bedford Borough Council
Western neighbour. A1 / Bedford approaches and existing urban services. Precept, not annexation.
Huntingdonshire District Council
North-eastern neighbour across the county line. The point of the Charter is that one envelope can sit on that line.
Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Combined Authority
Regional counterpart for skills and some transport. Not a precept recipient unless it is the billing authority.
Precept maths — a worked example, not a forecast
Replace every number. The point is the formula, not the year-one guess.
| Gross Consolidated Municipal Levy, illustrative year | £20,000,000 |
| Neighbour precept at 12.5% | £2,500,000 |
| Worked split: Central Bedfordshire 55% | £1,375,000 |
| Bedford Borough 25% | £625,000 |
| Huntingdonshire 20% | £500,000 |
| First alienation slice at 10% of £40m receipts | £4,000,000 |
Council tax and non-domestic rates do not apply inside the Area. The levy is set on floor area and use. If three service standards fail for a quarter, the High Steward faces a trust audit. Thirty days of a failed guaranteed standard can abate the levy by up to 40 percent for those affected.
What the Pattern Book would permit in year one
Not a masterplan of 40,000 dwellings. A first phase that can be built under the fourteen-day Certificate of Conformance: streets that already exist in the Book, a reserved-stock floor of 20 percent, and no new typology without a Jury.
T1 terrace
Residential streets within a ten-minute walk of the interchange.
4.5–6.0 m frontage, 2–3 storeys plus attic, front door on the street, garden behind. First reserved-stock houses live here, not in a separate estate.
T2 perimeter block
The station square and the primary street that meets it.
3–5 storeys, fifth set back. Ground floor shops, surgeries, workshops. Mixed open-market and Amenity Trust dwellings above. No podium tower.
T3 workshop-house
Mews and the first making street, off the primary frontage.
Ground floor 3.2 m clear for work; dwelling above. Servicing from the lane, not the square.
T4 civic room
One hall and the first school site, locked by Covenant Article 7.4.
Public or charitable use. Disposal needs a Jury resolution and a Trust resolution, each with a recorded alternative.
Refused without a Jury: podium towers, blank primary frontages longer than eight metres, curtain-walled street elevations, visitor-let layouts designed as hotels. Cars sit on-plot to the rear or in a single T2 undercroft that is not the elevation. A conforming Certificate is not a Civic Jury question.
What stays national
- —Crown sovereignty and Letters Patent revocation
- —Indictable crime, the constabulary, and the Crown Court
- —Defence, borders, currency, and intelligence
- —East West Rail and the East Coast Main Line as national railway works
- —National habitat, water, and waste duties — the consultee clock is disapplied, the harm rule is not
The Environmental Indemnity Bond (working floor: £50 million with the Treasury) and strict liability in tort back harm that leaves the Area. Disapplying the consultee duty is not a licence to concrete a river.
How to attack this page
Pure negation is incompetent. If Tempsford is the wrong first footprint, name another that still meets the statutory floor, pays its neighbours, keeps reserved stock, and can take a Pattern Book street in year one. If 1,200 hectares is too large or too small, send the replacement map and the precept split that still funds the host.
Read with the enabling Act, the Civic Covenant, the Pattern Book, and what this is not. Published numbers on homes and land in the corridor come from government new-town work and public compact-town studies; they are cited as the existing debate, not as AICB commitments.