Draft Greater Cambridge Local Plan for consultation

Object

Representation ID: 211763

Received: 30/01/2026

Respondent: Camcycle

Legally compliant? Not specified

Sound? Not specified

Duty to co-operate? Not specified

The Plan states that its spatial strategy (where and when things happen) has been informed by carbon assessment, but this has largely been a qualitative assessment and it has not translated into policies that deliver binding development requirements.

Climate objectives cannot be met through technology alone. For transport they require sustained mode shift, which in turn depends on land use, density and layout decisions that actively favour walking, wheeling, cycling and public transport.

In Cambridge, it is possible within this Plan period to achieve sustainable mode share of up to 90% of trips if land use and connectivity are planned in a way that provides people with local needs and high-quality active travel and public transport, whilst correctly pricing the cost of car ownership. At present, there is a risk that overly cautious assessments and a reluctance to allocate housing in more challenging locations are constraining the Plan’s potential to deliver sustainable development.

Object

Representation ID: 211764

Received: 30/01/2026

Respondent: Camcycle

Legally compliant? Not specified

Sound? Not specified

Duty to co-operate? Not specified

The Plan’s own evidence shows a growing imbalance between where people live and where people work. Employment growth remains heavily concentrated in Cambridge and its immediate edge, while housing growth is increasingly dispersed across the wider area.

Yet, the Plan does little to acknowledge the scale of the issue or set out a clear pathway to resolve it. Instead, the spatial strategy risks entrenching existing problems by further separating homes from jobs.

Figure 12 in the Plan shows a clear and sustained reduction in the proportion of new housing being delivered within Cambridge, alongside a corresponding increase in housing growth in more distant and dispersed locations. On its own, this figure could be read simply as a response to constraints within the city. However, when considered alongside the continued concentration of employment growth in Cambridge, it points to a more serious structural issue. Homes and jobs are increasingly being planned in different places.

Object

Representation ID: 211765

Received: 30/01/2026

Respondent: Camcycle

Legally compliant? Not specified

Sound? Not specified

Duty to co-operate? Not specified

The Transport Evidence Report usefully confirms that location is decisive for transport outcomes. It shows that development in Cambridge and on the edge of Cambridge generates far fewer additional car trips per home or job than remote new settlements, and has dramatically lower car mode share.

However, the Transport Evidence Report also illustrates a key weakness in the Plan’s evidence base. It largely relies on ‘predict and provide’ modelling, testing conservative assumptions and then seeking mitigation, rather than exploring what could be achieved through stronger policy requirements and place-based design. It does not meaningfully test scenarios where edge of Cambridge sites are planned to achieve Eddington-level sustainable mode share, nor does it interrogate how different parking, permeability, density and amenity assumptions could change outcomes. This risks baking in low ambition and treating car dependency as a baseline rather than something planning can and should prevent.

Object

Representation ID: 211766

Received: 30/01/2026

Respondent: Camcycle

Legally compliant? Not specified

Sound? Not specified

Duty to co-operate? Not specified

The Transport Evidence Report makes comparisons between sites such as Grange Farm, Waterbeach and Northstowe that do not reflect the different delivery mechanisms and constraints that will shape real-world travel behaviour. In practice, committed mitigation and policy requirements will determine outcomes, and the Local Plan should be using the evidence base to set higher expectations, not to normalise conservative mode share assumptions.

Object

Representation ID: 211767

Received: 30/01/2026

Respondent: Camcycle

Legally compliant? Not specified

Sound? Not specified

Duty to co-operate? Not specified

No equivalent spatial or temporal analysis has been produced for employment growth, and this should be addressed with urgency. Despite the scale of growth, the Local Plan does not provide an equivalent analysis of employment distribution to sit alongside Figure 12. Employment growth is discussed largely in narrative terms and embedded within individual site allocations, making it difficult to understand how the distribution of jobs compares with the distribution of housing over the Plan period. Camcycle considers this a serious omission.

A clear diagram showing the spatial and temporal distribution of employment growth, using the same geography and timeframes as Figure 12, is essential to assess whether homes and jobs are being planned in the same places and to properly understand the transport implications of the spatial strategy.

Object

Representation ID: 211768

Received: 30/01/2026

Respondent: Camcycle

Legally compliant? Not specified

Sound? Not specified

Duty to co-operate? Not specified

With around 8,000 dwellings and between 2,000 and 4,000 jobs anticipated, the proposed trip budget risks normalising high levels of car use rather than driving mode shift. The framing of the trip budget also lacks spatial context. We should plan for a number of vehicular trips feeding onto the A14; however any trips into the city are extremely problematic, and must be discouraged. General vehicle access to Barnwell Road should therefore be removed as well as the numerous site accesses onto Newmarket Road.

The Plan also underestimates the level of investment required in the surrounding active travel network. Several critical nodes are already at or beyond capacity. The Coldham’s Lane railway crossing near the Beehive site will not be capable of accommodating the level of walking and cycling demand and no safe, high-quality solution is possible without widening the space under Coldham’s Lane railway bridge by Sainsbury’s. Both of these should be treated as a prerequisite for development, not aspirations.

Policy S/CE and associated infrastructure policies should be amended to:
● Review car trip budgets and introduce binding walking, cycling and public transport mode share targets
● Make delivery of key active travel links a planning condition and phasing trigger, supported by a co-delivery plan between the councils, highways authority and developers, including pooled funding where necessary.
● Explore and understand the need for connectivity across Coldham’s Common with financial safeguarding to deliver a bridge from the Cambridge Retail Park to Coldham’s Common.

Object

Representation ID: 211769

Received: 30/01/2026

Respondent: Camcycle

Legally compliant? Not specified

Sound? Not specified

Duty to co-operate? Not specified

With or without the Hartree proposal, the Cambridge North development area represents a step change in intensity and movement demand. However, the current planning framework lacks a coherent transport-led spatial strategy. Movement through the Cambridge North station area is already compromised, with a loss of segregation and lack of coherent surfacing that risks bringing pedestrians and cyclists into unnecessary conflict. Beyond that there are bottlenecks such as the shared-use path at Moss Bank, which is three metres wide and already functioning as a critical failure point. This constraint is not adequately acknowledged in the Plan or in the previously issued North Cambridge Area Action Plan, despite the scale of growth proposed.

More fundamentally, the river crossings are insufficient. The Chisholm Trail bridge, while valuable, was conceived to connect Abbey and Chesterton. It was not designed to provide, nor does it achieve, effective connectivity between Cambridge North, Riverside and the Commons. That movement is currently provided by the Green Dragon Bridge, whose limitations are only lightly acknowledged in the Plan.

Without a new or significantly improved bridge, high levels of cycling to and from Cambridge North will not be achieved. This is not a local issue, but a strategic constraint that directly limits densification and sustainable travel. All growth at Cambridge North is affected by this.

The Local Plan should treat a new or substantially upgraded river crossings as essential infrastructure.

Object

Representation ID: 211770

Received: 30/01/2026

Respondent: Camcycle

Legally compliant? Not specified

Sound? Not specified

Duty to co-operate? Not specified

The expansion of the Biomedical Campus is understandable given its regional and national importance. However, the Local Plan does not yet set out a sufficiently robust spatial strategy to accompany this growth. While Cambridge South station will significantly improve access, it primarily resolves an existing deficiency rather than enabling the scale of growth now proposed. Transport cannot be treated as a single intervention. Large-scale employment growth without corresponding housing or
genuinely mixed-use development risks intensifying peak travel demand and increasing pressure on already constrained corridors. At present, the level of mixed-use development proposed around the campus is token. If the objective is to support healthcare, research and education, the Plan must enable people to live close to where they work.

The policy should:
● Require genuinely mixed-use development at a meaningful scale within and adjacent to the Biomedical Campus, including high-density housing with low car ownership, to reduce the need for long-distance commuting
● Avoid token residential provision and explicitly link employment growth to housing delivery in a walking or cycling distance to the campus

Object

Representation ID: 211771

Received: 30/01/2026

Respondent: Camcycle

Legally compliant? Not specified

Sound? Not specified

Duty to co-operate? Not specified

Figure 63 appears to justify Green Belt land release by presenting a fortified edge to the expansion area. While this may be intended as mitigation, it risks locking in long-term structural barriers to sustainable growth. If land is released around the Biomedical Campus, the Plan should not embed physical and spatial constraints that prevent homes being built close to the campus.

Recent investment around Addenbrooke’s has delivered no net benefit for active travel. In some cases, conditions have worsened, with changes to the busway and degradation of key cycling corridors contributing to declining levels of cycling to the Campus. The Plan identifies cycle connections over the railway, but does not acknowledge that these are already major failure points as well as a fragmented on-site network. The busway bridge in particular requires significant intervention, either through cantilevered widening or a parallel structure, if it is to support the level of cycling demand associated
with further Campus expansion.

Connectivity between the Biomedical Campus and West Cambridge is critical if growth in these two areas is to be successful. This is discussed further in the following section.

The policy should:
● Ensure that boundary treatments associated with Green Belt release do not create long-term physical or spatial barriers to movement, future connections or neighbouring communities
● Identify the active travel connections over the railway line as critical infrastructure and explicitly acknowledge the need for improvement
● Secure firm commitments to upgrade the key walking and cycling corridors serving the campus, including Trumpington Road, Long Road and the busway path with delivery tied to development phasing.

Object

Representation ID: 211772

Received: 30/01/2026

Respondent: Camcycle

Legally compliant? Not specified

Sound? Not specified

Duty to co-operate? Not specified

At present, public transport connectivity between West Cambridge and the Biomedical Campus is poor, unreliable and in places unsafe.

If growth is to continue at these two sites, we have to improve connectivity between them. It is possible to achieve a 20-minute journey time for public transport and cycling. Achieving this by bus requires a step change in bus priority and reliability. This is not simply a transport strategy matter. It does not depend on major new infrastructure, but on clear choices and strong action. The Local Plan has a critical role in setting the direction and establishing the political basis for those choices now. Delivering a 20-minute public transport journey would require significant reductions in general traffic in the city core particularly around Lensfield Road and the approaches to the city centre. These interventions involve decisions that could be explicitly acknowledged and supported through the Local Plan. Without this, bus-based solutions will remain constrained by congestion.