At the end of the consultation period the Planning Minister will be briefed by his civil servants on the consultation response. Particular weight will be given to statutory bodies like Natural England who have to be consulted by law, and to key representative bodies such as Bedford Borough Council and Central Bedfordshire Council who represent the public most directly affected by the proposal. The Minister then needs to reach a decision on whether to grant approval or not. None of this should take an extended period of time, and none of the important responses should be a surprise to the Minister if the government and Universal used the last 12 months to address any concerns and challenges that legitimately rise from such a major development. Any NIMBY responses from the public I suspect will be routinely ignored, so nothing in the consultation response should form a significant barrier to the Minister approving the planning application.
Assuming the planning application is approved by the Minister, the next and final step will be to table the Statutory Instrument ( a piece of secondary legislation) which contains the Special Development Order in the House of Commons and the House of Lords. I think it is likely that they will be tabled as a "Made Negative" SI, which essentially means that it is assumed to be approved by the Commons and the Lords without requiring a debate and a division at the point at which the government tables the SI. Once tabled both Houses have three weeks to proactively raise an objection if they don't want the SI to be made in to law. The chance of this objection being raised and voted on is so vanishingly small it's not worth considering. The Commons and the Lords need to be sitting for this process to be completed, so while Parliament returns from the Summer Recess on 1 September, it rises again for a four-week recess for the party conference season (16 September - 13 October). I'd therefore expect the entire process to be completed and signed in to law by late October, early November. However, the fact that this project has been confirmed by the Prime Minister with an event at No.10 in which he hosted senior executives from Comcast, and Universal Creative continue to hire senior members of the design team alongside continuing preparatory works at the site should tell us all we need to know about whether the planning application has any chance of being denied...