HCA LOCAL INVESTMENT PLAN AND EEDA INFRASTRUCTURE DELIVERY PROGRAMME
The aim is to generate a ‘business plan’ that will set out the rationale and summarise all infrastructure projects across all delivery partners required to deliver sustainable communities in the area, including health, education, transport, utilities, greenspace and others.
The document is not a strategy in it’s own right; it is an action plan that draws together the capital programmes already established in the partners strategies, and, while it is mindful of the overall targets set for 2021, it focuses on the nearer timeframes set out in these strategies.
Both the Homes and Communities Agency and the East of England Development Agency are promoting a model for this approach; HCA’s model is focussed on homes and regeneration whereas EEDA’s model is focussed on economic growth. Both models recognise the complementary need for each others input and the equal need to include other agendas. The common purposes in both models are to:
• identify infrastructure requirements for delivering the homes and jobs growth agenda;
• assess infrastructure timing and delivery against homes and jobs delivery trajectory;
• inform and share across all infrastructure delivering partners the range of planned projects and the progress on delivery; and
• assess availability of delivery finance and inform funding bids to address the shortfalls.
EEDA’s IDP process is well advanced with four pilot areas producing their IDP following the EEDA Toolkit model and a further ten documents underway, including Bedford.
The first version of the IDP for Bedford Borough was published in September 2009. This document, while based on the EEDA process, takes account of the expected HCA needs by considering the infrastructure to support both the homes growth and jobs growth. As would be expected from the first iteration of a long term project, this is very much a ‘direction of travel’ document, which will both explain the process to partners and support consultation to build the necessary cross-partner buy-in.
Click on Bedford Infrastructure Delivery Programme to access the document published in September 2009.
HCA’s LIP guidance was published in January, with an expectation that all local authority areas will have a plan in place by December 2010. The second version of the Bedford document will incorporate this guidance, together with detailed infrastructure needs, and is expected to be considered by the partners in June.
The work to date covers only the Bedford Borough area; discussions on production of similar information for Central Bedfordshire projects are expected shortly.
2010.