Is growth good?
I do not consider growth to be intrinsically bad – however, most of the drive for growth comes from local landowners and businesses who want to locate here. As a resident, I am watching from the sidelines and seeing family homes turned into cramped multiple occupancies, constant traffic jams, parking problems, pollution and house prices that make it hard for our children to live in the same area. If the model of 40% growth is used for the next 100 years, it becomes 440% - a total of almost 700,000 homes. It is not unreasonable to ask, “At what point will the current model be forced to change?”
I fully accept that Cambridge clearly has a major national and international role to play and the prosperity of future generations will be affected by decisions that emanate are taken now. But there are clear tensions – what will be the impact on our local neighbourhood and on the surrounding environment? The Greater Cambridge Councils are ultimately responsible to residents and must address this fundamental concern head on if they want residents to have true ownership of the future of our city. Engagement with the public through the consultation process by those responsible for creating the Plan has been thoughtful and professional, but has ignored the elephant in the room – just how much are residents prepared to tolerate? If we are to resolve the tensions, we must not proceed by formulae nor re-act purely through nimbyism. We need to talk and to find ways to “accentuate the positives and eliminate the negatives”.
What do the two key statistics of 55,500 new jobs and 48,840 homes mean?
Page 24 states “We propose that the new Local Plan will meet the following objectively assessed needs for development in the period 2020-2041:
§ 58,500 jobs
§ 44,400 homes [which, after adding 10%, becomes 48,840]
The meaning of the 58,500 figure is unclear.
There is clearly an intention to “develop” new jobs, but it is not clear what qualifies as a “development”. The issue is highlighted by the loss of Marshall’s in 2030. The Plan identifies Cambridge East as creating 9,000 jobs on the land released. However, some 4,000 jobs already existed at the airport and these will be lost to Cambridge. The actual, net number of new jobs “developed” will be 5,000 and not 9,000, so the base figure for calculating housing should surely be 54,500.
Over the period of the Plan there will be many other examples e.g. How many staff will existing hospitals agree to lose in order to staff the Cambridge Children’s Hospital?
It is unclear whether these figures are intended to be forecasts or projections.
Essentially, a forecast is an educated guess while a projection is simply based on extending a trend. From my understanding of the Evidence Study, your consultants have simply generated a projection from existing data to generate the figures.
The addition of 10% to the housing figure adds a layer of confusion, since the original figure of 44,400 is therefore a projection based on past employment data. Were this to be displayed graphically, using standard techniques, you would show the past data following a central projection line with outliers for the extreme cases (as in the projected climate change graph below). The extreme cases already exist and are described in the table in the Evidence Study Page 102.
So, how could you show the 10% on this diagram? Are you adding to the central or the higher projection? Neither makes sense!
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Ultimately the data is open to more than one interpretation.
This analysis arose because I asked myself the question – do you have a target number of homes to build? My understanding is that you are only planning to build 44,400 and you would be happy with that. This is consistent with your statement on page 26 that “We consider that our objectively assessed need for housing for 2020-2041 is the number associated with the most likely future level of jobs: this is a figure of 44,400 homes.”.
So where does the 10% fit into this? On page 31 you add a nominal buffer of 10% to deal with unforeseen circumstances by identifying enough sites to build more houses if the need arises. Whilst this is a perfectly sensible contingency, it does nothing to add to the number of houses you plan to build and so your target remains 44,400 homes. However, in the table on page 31, you refer to 48,800 as the number of homes to be built. So, did you intend this to be the target?
I apologise for this lengthy discussion, but the issue is significant.