Greater Cambridge Local Plan Preferred Options

The rejection of planning sites put forward for development in Histon & Impington, in the first phase of a new Local Plan should be mitigated by the need for some affordable housing units to sustain the villages in the future as a viable community. The current Villages’ Neighbourhood Plan emphasises this need, which can be met by the provision of smaller Rural Exception Sites, delivered by the local Community Land Trust.
HICLT understands the rejection of large-scale sites in and around Histon and Impington, following the recent call for sites. The fact that our community is surrounded by either the green belt or the City boundary means that large scale development will always conflict with existing well-established policies to prevent urban sprawl. We have no desire to see these protections removed or weakened. Bringing large sites within our settlements’ development envelope will only exacerbate the problems of unaffordability and capital extraction from the community. All it will mean is that high priced housing for sale will be developed making little or no contribution to meeting local housing need for genuinely affordable options. In these circumstances large developers will build out most of the site minimising their affordable contribution through viability assessments and deliver whatever they choose to provide by partnering with large registered social housing providers, with no community specific connection or commitment.

We want to propose, within the existing policy framework, the development of some rural exception sites to provide affordable housing. We would propose two routes for this:
1. Rural exception sites to be carved out of some of the larger sites put forward, providing a much more modest and acceptable scale development.
2. Put forward possible rural exception sites in locations not submitted in the wider call for sites. There may be smaller parts of existing agricultural sites that landowners had not considered for submission, but which may nonetheless, in the context of the rural exception policy, provide better located opportunities than some of the larger previously submitted sites. A particular local constraint is the 800 metre radius from the two village centres within which housing development should take place. This current constraint points us to potential small sites at the top of Mill Lane on either or both sides, where Chivers Farms and the County Council hold land.

The rejection of planning sites put forward for development in Histon & Impington, in the first phase of a new Local Plan should be mitigated by the need for some affordable housing units to sustain the villages in the future as a viable community. The current Villages’ Neighbourhood Plan emphasises this need, which can be met by the provision of smaller Rural Exception Sites, delivered by the local Community Land Trust.
HICLT understands the rejection of large-scale sites in and around Histon and Impington, following the recent call for sites. The fact that our community is surrounded by either the green belt or the City boundary means that large scale development will always conflict with existing well-established policies to prevent urban sprawl. We have no desire to see these protections removed or weakened. Bringing large sites within our settlements’ development envelope will only exacerbate the problems of unaffordability and capital extraction from the community. All it will mean is that high priced housing for sale will be developed making little or no contribution to meeting local housing need for genuinely affordable options. In these circumstances large developers will build out most of the site minimising their affordable contribution through viability assessments and deliver whatever they choose to provide by partnering with large registered social housing providers, with no community specific connection or commitment.

HICLT would urge the Council to develop and adopt, within the next Local Plan, a Supplementary Planning Document (SPD) to provide support for community led housing proposals.
Some such support within the Local Plan will be essential if the general support for this approach to developing affordable homes both at national and local levels is to be effective.

Organisations such as community land trust (CLTs) need some support in Local Plans because they find it difficult to compete with longer established developers. Without it developments will not be community led, owned and run.

We recognise that any encouragement for CLTs via some form of SPD, must be reasonable. However, we think it appropriate for an SPD to give specific weight to community led housing as the preferred form of delivery for rural exception sites given the very close links to the communities CLTs have and the exceptional nature of these sites. Such a policy would also reduce the risk of the control of such sites moving out of the community and also encourage the retention of capital within the community, increasing its resilience.