A new neighbourhood, already decided
Somewhere on Grantham's south-eastern edge, beyond the arc of the new Southern Relief Road, a neighbourhood of 3,400 homes is being planned. Spitalgate Heath Garden Village — promoted by the Buckminster Estate and one of 14 government-designated garden villages announced in January 2017 — will take between 25 and 30 years to build out. Updated outline plans were submitted in December 2025. People who move into its final phases may arrive in 2040 or later.
By then, a great deal will already have been settled on their behalf.
The energy system, the broadband infrastructure, the metering arrangements: each of these is being determined at masterplan stage, years before any household unpacks a box or switches on a kettle. That is not unusual for large developments — infrastructure has to be planned — but at Spitalgate Heath the commitments are unusually specific. The practical question worth sitting with is a simple one: when the wiring of a home is decided before any resident has been consulted, who exactly are those decisions made for?
No gas, all-electric, and the end of resident choice on energy
The most fundamental of these commitments concerns energy. Buckminster has ruled out gas connections across the entire site — not as a preference, but as a structural decision baked into the masterplan. Every home will be all-electric, fed through on-site smart microgrids paired with rooftop solar PV and neighbourhood-level battery storage. Construction standards are set at EPC 'A', built to a fabric-first specification: high-spec insulation and airtightness going beyond baseline Building Regulations to reduce demand before generation is even considered.
The intended result is genuinely appealing. On-site renewable generation is designed to supply residents at below market retail electricity prices — a direct and concrete benefit for household budgets. In a period when energy costs have been volatile and many households have struggled to manage bills, being connected to cheaper local generation is a real proposition, not a marketing flourish.
What it also means, however, is that the energy arrangement is fixed. A resident who moves into Spitalgate Heath will not choose their energy supplier, negotiate a different tariff structure, or switch to a rival technology if something better emerges. The microgrid is the infrastructure: there is no equivalent of changing broadband provider. Whether heat pump standards improve significantly, whether personal energy contracts evolve, whether a resident simply prefers a different arrangement — none of these are options the masterplan leaves open. The choice was made before they arrived.
Broadband: what the law now requires, and what Lincolnshire's reality looks like
Part R of the Building Regulations, which came into force on 26 December 2022, sets a clear national floor for broadband in new homes. Every new-build dwelling must have gigabit-ready physical infrastructure — ducts, chambers, and a network termination point running from the boundary into the property (Requirement RA1) — and a functional gigabit-capable connection (RA2). The live connection requirement is subject to a £2,000-per-dwelling cost cap: if a gigabit connection would cost more, developers must install the next fastest available technology instead. The ducting, however, must still go in regardless. Developers are also required to submit a formal connectivity plan with building control applications.
New phases of Spitalgate Heath will fall squarely within these regulations. In that sense, the development's broadband infrastructure is less a Buckminster choice than a legal obligation — though the regulations specify capability and physical readiness, not a particular provider or open-access arrangement.
Against the wider Lincolnshire picture, the contrast is notable. As of late 2024, Openreach reports nearly 200,000 premises across the county can now upgrade to full fibre, and ThinkBroadband's August 2026 projections — based on BDUK data — suggest gigabit coverage may reach approximately 91% by January 2029. That is a projection, not a guarantee, and the remaining gap falls disproportionately on rural communities: villages including Swinstead, Swayfield, and Surfleet are still waiting. A new development arriving with gigabit infrastructure already in the ground will be better connected than many of its neighbours from day one.
What the design code does with that baseline — whether it addresses provider diversity, open-access obligations, or the data governance of smart distribution networks — is not established in the publicly available planning documents. Those questions remain open.
Smart meters: embedded by design, practically unavoidable
A SMETS2 smart meter does one thing that older meters do not: it transmits energy usage data automatically, at regular intervals, to the energy supplier. That transmission is the point of contention. Residents in England are not legally required to permit it — the right to decline data sharing technically exists. In practice, however, that right has little weight. Traditional meters are virtually out of production in the UK, meaning a resident who wants a non-smart alternative will find no replacement available. The opt-out right and the opt-out mechanism are not the same thing.
Government guidance updated in March 2026 directs builders and architects to design new homes for SMETS2 installation as standard. Spitalgate Heath's masterplan goes further: smart-meter-ready distribution networks are physically embedded across the phased layout before any household arrives. The infrastructure decision, like the energy infrastructure decision, is made at the design stage.
What is not addressed in any publicly available planning document is data governance: who will hold the granular usage data generated by thousands of homes across a 25–30 year build period, under what terms, and with what accountability to residents. That absence is worth naming. It does not imply wrongdoing — the gap is common to large-scale new developments nationally — but it is exactly the kind of question a design code could, in principle, begin to answer.
The decision chain: who actually chooses
Three distinct layers of authority shape what gets built at Spitalgate Heath — and they operate at very different distances from the people who will eventually live there.
At the top, national government sets the floor. MHCLG frameworks, Building Regulations (including Part R on broadband), and the National Model Design Code define what any large development must deliver as a minimum. These are statutory requirements, not negotiable at site level.
Below that, South Kesteven District Council will adopt a design code as a Supplementary Planning Document. That code will legally govern the reserved matters applications submitted phase by phase over the coming decades — setting standards on layout, materials, and infrastructure detail as each tranche of homes goes through planning. The council is the democratic accountability layer in the process.
But the substantive technology choices — no gas connections, all-electric homes, microgrid architecture, smart-meter-ready networks — were made earlier and further upstream, at masterplan stage, by the Buckminster Estate and its consultants. By the time the design code is being written, these assumptions are already commitments.
The November 2025 public consultation illustrates the point. Residents were invited to comment on transport routes, nature provision, and design character. Those are genuine questions. What they were not invited to revisit was whether the development should be all-electric, or whether microgrid dependency was the right infrastructure model. Those decisions had already been made.
This is not unusual. It is simply how large-scale masterplan development works in England. But the practical consequence is clear: future residents inherit an infrastructure settlement negotiated years before they arrive, between a private landowner and its professional advisers, with no formal mechanism for household-level input at any stage of that process.
A 25-year build and the technology it cannot predict
Planning across a 25-to-30-year horizon requires committing to technology that does not yet know what it will become. The outline plans submitted in December 2025 will set the energy model for homes that may not reach their first occupants until 2040 or later. In that window, heat pump standards, smart metering regulation, and grid architecture could change significantly.
The all-electric, fabric-first approach may well prove durable — insulation and electrification are not fashions that age badly. But they remain a bet, placed on behalf of people who have not yet decided to live there.
The practical question is whether any mechanism exists to revisit that bet. Reserved-matters applications, submitted phase by phase over decades, offer one opportunity in principle: standards can in theory be updated as each tranche of homes goes through planning. But the fundamental infrastructure choices — no gas connections, microgrid dependency — sit inside the outline permission itself, not in reserved matters. No planning process available to a future resident can reintroduce a gas connection the masterplan removed in 2025.
That is not a design failure. It is the structural logic of building a joined-up energy system: you cannot do it while leaving each household free to opt out. What it does mean is that the question this article opened with — who are these decisions made for? — has a clear and honest answer. They are made for an imagined future resident, by the people with the capital and the authority to build the place. Whether residents arriving in Phase 4 would have made the same choices is a question the planning process, as currently structured, has no mechanism to ask.
- [1] Grantham — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/?curid=152678 https://en.wikipedia.org/?curid=152678