Community

Our commitment to the community is locally as well as nationally focused. So although we are a proud national scale company, we maintain strong local links with the communities in which our businesses are based and believe we have a responsibility to make a positive contribution and actively support those local communities.

With a long history in farming it is not surprising that we have a track record of empathy with rural communities and the countryside. However this extends to our sympathetic approach to neighbours and the neighbourhoods we serve. So we support our local communities in many ways; by responding to their housing and commercial development needs - always with a sympathetic understanding of the local environment and social culture; by interacting with social and educational institutions; by providing sustainable employment opportunities; and by charitable donations and financial support for appropriate and worthwhile causes.

For example:

Housing:

• We were made aware of an urgent need for low cost housing in North Beds. So, in Felmersham, we provided land for social housing at a nominal price to make the construction of 6 ‘social houses’ possible.

Education:

• In October 2006 Bedfordia Group sponsored individual students from Sharnbrook Upper School to take part in a combined football, hockey, rugby and netball tour of Canada and the USA. One student who wrote to thank Bedfordia said that ‘without the sponsorship money the trip would not have been possible’, while another described it as ‘The trip of a lifetime’.
• In 2007 Bedfordia assisted Sharnbrook School again by sponsoring a recycling programme and paying for 33 paper recycling bins for use throughout the school.
• In 2005 and 2007, Bedfordia sponsored the biennial Bedfordshire Music Concerts held at the Royal Albert Hall in London in which nearly 800 students participated each time.
• Bedfordia has been an annual sponsor of the “Bedfordia Cross Country Championship” organised by Lincroft Middle School in Oakley, Bedfordshire.

Community:

• As part of a development involving 500 houses at North Brickhill, we have donated 28ha (70 acres) of land for a country park. The total site area is 50ha (124 acres) of which the residential development occupies only 15.5ha (38 acres), the rest being the country park, playing fields and other open spaces.
• Bedfordia Farms donated 3 ha (7.5 acres) of land to the Ibbett Trust for the building of a 66 bed care home for the elderly at Brickhill - to be run by Methodist Homes for the Aged.