Draft Greater Cambridge Local Plan for consultation

Replace reference to housing numbers in part b. with: "A minimum of 59,409 new homes meeting the needs for the total population..."

Review whether the jobs numbers are sufficient in light of the Local Growth Plan ambitions. Include "at least" at the start of part a.

Consider a policy addition that links bringing forward additional growth of delivery of homes and jobs on major sites (with capacity beyond the Plan period) with milestones in infrastructure delivery

Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Combined Authority (CPCA) approved its Local Growth Plan in November 2025. This sets out the ambition for growth, and our shared approach with government in delivering the national Industrial Strategy and growth missions. The Local Growth Plan’s ambitions go beyond the growth proposed in the Draft Local Plan. CPCA are commencing work on the Spatial Development Strategy.

The Draft Local Plan currently references the previous 2022 economic strategy and needs to be updated to include appropriate description of the Local Growth Plan and its ambition (including the approach to key growth sectors) as context. The Draft Local Plan needs to set out its role in taking forward the Local Growth Plan.

The Local Growth Plan positions the CPCA area to be the fastest growing regional economy outside of London. It includes a ‘Core’ scenario of doubling the size of the economy by 2050, and the Mayor’s ambition of tripling the economy over that period. Greater Cambridge is vital to achieving the aims of the Local Growth Plan, as acknowledged by the Global City Opportunity Zone.

Evidence supporting the Draft Local Plan’s overall level of employment and housing allocations is contained in the supporting document “Greater Cambridge Employment and Housing Needs Update 2024-2045". This recommends a Central scenario of 48,132 additional homes and 73,200 additional jobs.

We note that the amount of housing arising from the employment assumptions results in a figure that is also almost identical to the homes identified by the government’s Standard Method for determining local authority-level minimum housing needs (the Standard Method results in 48,198 homes, or 2,295 per annum). It is noted that delivery of homes over the last 7 years has averaged 1,832 homes per annum.

The above evidence report recommends the Central scenario because it provides for growth in line with recent performance, taking into account the cyclical nature of the economy over a period of the next 21 years. The Draft Local Plan’s Core Scenario assumes compound growth rates for employment that do not reach those used in the Local Growth Plan’s Core (doubling) ambition.

The report does acknowledge that higher scenarios could be achieved or exceeded (paragraph 3.62). It considers this requires a step change in infrastructure investment and development, notably in transport to connect and move labour, as well as wider services infrastructure. It also notes that some core economic data on performance comes from BRES national data, which is updated via a sample approach, whereas locally specific monitoring by Cambridge Business Research records significantly higher growth.

Given the Local Growth Plan ambitions, the local data highlighting rapid economic growth, transport improvements (including the collaborative work of the CPCA on the GCTS), and the government supporting growth through Cambridge Growth Company’s additional intervention (including a proposed Development Corporation), it is recommended that the Local Plan provides for at least its High scenario (59,409 homes). This would also enable infrastructure providers and Government to determine the need for appropriate capacity via ongoing investment.

We are aware that there are delivery constraints to overcome, not least regarding water supply and waste water management. These are the case even with the Core scenario. Good progress has been made on interim solutions, and bringing together action to address the variety of delivery constraints is a shared mission of the CPCA and the CGC. We shall be further examining this through the work needed to develop the CPCA-wide Spatial Development Strategy.

Appropriate policies in the Local Plan can make additional levels of growth or release of sites contingent on certain milestones in infrastructure delivery/capacity being realised. It could also achieve this by accelerating delivery. According to the Plan’s Infrastructure Delivery Plan, a number of the strategic sites identified in the emerging Local Plan have extended delivery programmes that mean they won’t reach full build-out until the 2060s. At full build-out, the total capacity of these sites is anticipated to be in the region of 92,000 homes. CPCA would welcome working in partnership to accelerate and deliver this growth.

CPCA reconfirms the position set out in our Statement of Intent (September 2025) that we are seeking to have an approved Greater Cambridge Transport Strategy (GCTS) in place by December 2026. The GCTS will:

Confirm the transport infrastructure requirements associated with the strategic sites proposed in the Greater Cambridge Local Plan.

Reflect a range of growth ambitions in Cambridgeshire, in partnership with the Cambridge Growth Company (GCG), identifying further needs for transport interventions.

Propose transport initiatives and policies to deal with the wider transport challenges across Greater Cambridge.

In preparing the GCTS, the Combined Authority intends to approve the GCTS by November 2026 to align with the proposed Local Plan Submission in December 2026. Our comments on the Draft Local Plan transport issues are therefore subject to the development of the GCTS.

The vision for the GCTS is for:

A transport system for Greater Cambridge that will give people a real choice about how they travel. The area will have efficient, safe, accessible, sustainable, integrated networks that reduce congestion, improve connectivity, and boost growth.

To take account of the GCTS vision, the Local Plan should seek to widen travel choice rather than promote modes. We propose that para 2.89 is reworded accordingly.

Given that the GCTS work is ongoing, we are not able to confirm our position on the transport policies or the recommendations provided in the Transport Mitigation Measures document accompanying the draft Plan (Draft Greater Cambridge Local Plan: New Strategic Allocations Assessment – Transport Mitigation Measures (2025) (WSP)).

The CPCA does consider that connectivity and high-quality public transport is essential to the successful development of proposed strategic sites. At this stage, the exact nature and form of the network for the sub-region remains under consideration.

The Mayor has set out his ambitions for a light rail system for Cambridge through the ‘Get Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Moving’ initiative, and light rail is a key element in this. The CPCA therefore requires the Plan to consistently refer to ‘high-quality public transport corridors’, including within site-specific sections, as the most appropriate mode for each corridor has yet to be determined.

policy is altered to apply the ‘permanent loss’ test to significant-scale solar farms on the highest grades of agricultural land.

This policy states that “Uses not involving substantial built development but which take agricultural land will be regarded as permanent unless ... reinstatement to its pre-development quality.”

The CPCA seeks to protect prime farmland. The use of prime farmland for a significant-scale solar farm might be allowed under policy J/AL as currently drafted if it had a condition requiring reinstatement to pre-development quality at some point - perhaps decades in the future. We request that this policy is altered to apply the ‘permanent loss’ test to significant-scale solar farms on the highest grades of agricultural land.

The Plan identifies specific locations as Public Realm Improvement Areas that would “benefit from a holistic approach to any future development that comes forward, to provide policy guidance for development that also improves public transport access and infrastructure delivery and seeks improvements to the public realm.” Those public realm improvements reference ‘place making’ over vehicle movement, especially at junctions.” That policy approach will need to be revisited in the light of the forthcoming Greater Cambridge Transport Strategy and any potential impacts the policy would have on the functions of the transport network.

We note Policy I/SI: Safeguarding important infrastructure and the schemes and locations where safeguarding is required. Although the extent of any network has yet to be defined, there may be a requirement for future safeguarding of LRT/MRT routes.

CPCA considers that infrastructure policies need to be viewed through a ‘widening travel choice’ lens. Policy I/ST Sustainable Transport and Connectivity is generally supported but the CPCA considers that, for example (paragraph 1, page 671) should be written as follows:

development must be located and, through a vision-led approach, designed to provide a genuine choice of modes, including sustainable transport provision appropriate to its location

The CPCA considers that infrastructure policies need to be viewed through a ‘widening travel choice’ lens.

For example, the Plan should reword the first bullet in the ‘What our infrastructure policies do’ to say “Detail how the transport impacts of development should be managed, and how new development should be located, designed and connected to the transport network to enable travel by sustainable choice of modes”.