Behind the Headlines

A tourist railway in Leighton Buzzard is still waiting for a new station complex to be built six years after developers of a local housing estate and councillors agreed on a deal to invest in the local community.

In 2002 the volunteers at Leighton Buzzard Narrow Gauge Steam railway were happy that proposals for building over 300 new homes nearby suggested the developers would build a new station at the railway’s Pages Park site.

Leighton Buzzard Narrow Guage Railway

But unknown to the railway, the final legal agreement – known as a 106 agreement – placed the onus on the railway to get the project started, limited the developer’s investment to a mere £100,000, and stipulated a time limit of three years to “substantially commence” building work.

When the developers withdrew from negotiations in 2005, the railway was surprised to learn of the 106 conditions, and the project has been in the doldrums since.

Section 106 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990 allows for local councils and developers to enter into an agreement as to how the developer will contribute to local facilities. Deals can be on such things as roads, hospitals or community centres.

Gareth Morgan of the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors says that many section 106 agreements get bogged down in tight legal language, to ensure things get delivered. “But that can also make them very inflexible when things go wrong”.

At Pages Park, the idea was to include facilities for community activities such as mother and toddler groups within a new visitor centre for the railway.

Residents of the Sandhills estate still have no such facility, and the Railway is still housed in a 30 year-old wooden shed well beyond its best.

“We’re a bunch of volunteers and we thought there would have been some support for us, but clearly that broke down”, says Mervyn Leah, chairman of the railway, told BBC Radio 4’s You and Yours programme.

“One would have thought that when we were coming up to deadline there would have been a formal review that could have looked at what corrective action could be taken. But nowhere in the process was there space for a review of what had gone wrong.”

No one from South Beds District Council was available for comment.