Draft Greater Cambridge Planning Obligations Supplementary Planning Document re-consultation - 2025

In our response to you in January 2025 we suggested that the SPD should be more ambitious in what you ask for towards sustainable transport infrastructure and services with the aim of addressing cumulative impact. We were disappointed in your response which was essentially to restate the statutory requirements for compliance with CIL Regulations.
I would like to draw your attention to how Hertfordshire County Council Highways structures its S106 agreements. We encourage Cambridgeshire, Cambridge and South Cambridgeshire to aspire to the same.
The A106 Agreement has been divided into two parts.
Strand 1 includes the usual infrastructure and service requirements to make a development acceptable in planning terms: junctions with the road network; connections to nearby active travel paths and public rights of way (where land ownerships do not prevent this); upgrades to off-site infrastructure where it is part of a key route e.g. to a local school, bus stop or railway station; funding for a new or intensified local bus service; etc. These interventions are typically delivered under a Section 278 agreement, and comply fully with all three of the regulatory compliance tests:
1. necessary to make the development acceptable in planning terms;
2. directly related to the development; and
3. fairly and reasonably related in scale and kind to the development.
Strand 2 covers interventions to address cumulative impact. These would not be 100% compliant with all three tests, in particular the third, when considered against a single development in isolation (otherwise they would be in Strand 1). Hertfordshire County Council describes the Strand 2 contribution in the Technical Appendix (attached) on transport contributions as follows:
Section 6.0 sets out the strand 2 calculations and shows how much an individual dwelling within each District/Borough would need to pay to cumulatively cover the cost of delivering the wider necessary sustainable transport works within their area. However, it should be stressed that these figures are the starting point for S106 discussions, and each application needs to be considered on its own merits
The justification and calculation set out in section 6.0 of that document arrives at a figure of £9,861 per dwelling, index-linked to March 2024. There can be some trade-off between Strand 1 and Strand 2: where a Strand 1 intervention (e.g. an enhanced bus service) will provide wider benefit, some of the value is deducted from the amount required under Strand 2.
The Strand 2 contributions will fund a step change in the scale and quality of off-site interventions to support sustainable travel in Hertfordshire.