Health Matters: Co-ordinated campaign against more housing across the region
I was really impressed by the co-ordinated campaigning against housing developments across the affected communities near Leighton Buzzard – with high resident numbers turning out at local meetings and the quality of social media messaging that people have created at short notice but to a high standard of research.
In the past 28 days our own Facebook site recorded Posts increases of 125% , reactions by +479% and comments up 189% by more residents looking into the state of the town’s infrastructure provision.
Back in May 2026 we wrote to the Director of Neighbourhood Health and Council Leaders chasing for information on the numbers of additional appointments at the clinic; outstanding Freedom of Information requests and a date for a promised meeting (our last was 14 months ago).
We also reminded them why we continue to campaign for Leighton Buzzards Health - Through a combination of previous Council decisions that prioritised politics before residents and more recent ICB funding cuts the only new Health Infrastructure that Central Bedfordshire has delivered is a wrongly sized ; underutilized “white elephant” at Grove View rather than two Whitehouse / Elverby style facilities delivered in Milton Keynes and that residents rightly feel they have experienced the most significant cutback of their plans of the entire health region whilst housing has surged and is projected to do so again (we didn’t realize how prophetic this was going to be at the time!)
In 2021 Leighton Buzzard become the largest town in Central Bedfordshire and the C.C.G Acadis 2019 Report had proposed a £20M investment for a Health Centre and 4th Clinic to support population growth to 60,000 by 2035.
When inherited by the BLMK ICB it has been effectively slow walked over 5 years via a Feasibility Study 2023, Outline Business Case 2024, with a last-minute effort by the local MP to try and obtain funds from a land sell off to help deliver something better than the cheapest option the BLMK ICB always advocated in each of its successively downgraded reports.
Once the ICB pivoted to their proposed refurbishment of the clinic with funding from Central Government of £971,000, this effectively stripped out all the cost benefit analysis in the original report (savings by avoiding admission to A&E, lack of direct public transport, environmental / cost impact related to longer distance travelled / optimizing outpatient appointments to those that actually required “Big Kit or Specialists etc.
And whilst appreciating the enormous challenges the new Central East ICB face - we do not accept the generic assumption about “affluence” or “we cannot provide that data” that avoids the critical analysis of plans that are impacting millions of people should require.
I just hope that the Councils / Central Government and Health Boards are listening this time around?