Greater Cambridge Local Plan Issues & Options 2020

Nothing chosen

Where to build? The current approach requires significant adjustment as it is too heavily geared towards long term and complex development projects involving the various new planned settlements. This approach is leaving the Councils unable to deliver sufficient housing numbers in the short to medium terms, and is therefore prejudicing their ability to meet their rolling five year housing land supply requirements and objectively assessed housing needs. It is also too Cambridge Centre/Cambridge Edge focused to the detriment of the villages in the District, including Guilden Morden. Without encouraging more allocations within the villages, their needs will effectively be ignored and the new Joint Local Plan strategy will miss out on valuable Section 106 opportunities to deliver community benefits and secure improvements to local infrastructure. A more dispersed and proportionate strategy would be more appropriate so that the distribution of development can be spread more evenly across the district to embrace an appropriate level of development and investment within the villages. Learning from the recent Local Plan Examination experiences of other nearby rural districts, such as Uttlesford District Council, adopting such a strategy would go a long way to ensuring that the Councils’ joint approach to the new Plan can ultimately be found to be ‘sound’ by the Inspector. Sites such as the one being promoted at ‘Land south of New Road, Guilden Morden’, adjoining the existing settlement, provide an excellent opportunity to deliver sustainable development solutions and much needed housing (including new affordable homes) to meet local needs in the short term. Our ‘Call for Sites’ report (December 2019) is attached for your ease of reference. This can be considered as a very logical ‘extension’ to the existing settlement boundary. This could form part of a wider comprehensive review exercise to identify similar opportunities for sustainable development within the villages across Cambridgeshire, which cumulatively would help the Councils to deliver the required number of dwellings to demonstrate a five year housing supply and ensure that development is more proportionately distributed across the district to meet objectively assessed needs. As referenced earlier, the absence of new housing allocations means that potential Section 106 opportunities to enhance local village facilities and infrastructure will not be realised. Moreover, there will be no injection of new residents, including younger people and families, with the associated increased expenditure to the local catchment area that such an injection would bring, thereby helping to underpin the long-term sustainability of villages, and ensuring mixed and balanced communities. For these reasons, we urge the Council to adjust its current approach so that it is not over reliant on Cambridge and the new planned settlements, with the associated skewed housing delivery focused on the longer term that it creates. Rather, we recommend that the Council adopts a dispersed and proportionate approach to development across the district, including site allocations throughout the villages, based on the principles of achieving sustainable development and capable of early delivery. This should specifically include the allocation of the land to the South of New Road, in Guilden Morden.