Greater Cambridge Local Plan Issues & Options 2020

More Neighbourhood Plans can recognise and protect key local vistas, Conservation Areas and non-designated heritage assets, alongside Listed Buildings and Scheduled Monuments. Development Control must give more weight to design factors laid out in Neighbourhood Plans and Village Design Statements if local character is to be conserved.

More Neighbourhood Plans can recognise and protect key local vistas, Conservation Areas and non-designated heritage assets, alongside Listed Buildings and Scheduled Monuments. Development Control must give more weight to design factors laid out in Neighbourhood Plans and Village Design Statements if local character is to be conserved.

Development Control must give more weight to design factors laid out in Neighbourhood Plans and Village Design Statements if local character is to be conserved. Parish Councils with Neighbourhood Plans or Village Design Statements should be given a stronger say in planning decisions.

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Continuing economic growth is not a given any more and should not be presumed, especially as more resources are diverted northwards. Great care should be taken when interpreting the Standard Method and Market Signals involved in predicting growth. Other city regions have the potential to regenerate within the lifetime of this plan and, unlike the Cambridge phenomenon of 20-30 years ago, many of the new jobs attracted recently have average pay, adding pressure to housing affordability and inequality.

Much of the hi-tech growth has been due to R&D in electronics , life-sciences and materials with life sciences dominating in recent years and materials the poor relation. It was the failure to provide appropriate accommodation which drove away the second and third phase growth from ARM, Cambridge Silicon Radio, Domino Printing Science and Xaar etc. and the opposite in Life Sciences for Astra Zeneca, Medical Research Centre and Sanger etc. with materials and Agritech exploitation already further out. All these expansions have put enormous pressure on the Cambridge road network and housing. The University itself will continue to be an important gestation centre for business and talent so “more of the same” seems a likely answer, especially if the job needs for an industrial centre are broadly met by adjacent housing – even if not on a 1:1 basis. Incoming businesses need a pool of local talent that does not get tangled up in local traffic on the way to work. Cycling is an option for many but not all; public transport can meet the needs of some but is not as flexible or as pervasive to be useful for the 24*7 work-style often present.

Artificial protection of today’s industrial and business space is unhelpful.

The knowledge-intensiveness appears to be reducing as evidenced by the wage differentials and the effect on our housing market. Higher-paid jobs tend to be most time-demanding as staff align with US West Coast and Asian working times. This creates an opportunity for increased home-working as communications technology is upgraded over the coming years. This also supports more flexible and part-time working but our transport network and, in effect, the personal car, is the first resort today with no solution in sight other than the transition to EV cars.

In the past, the Science Park succeeded because it was close enough to the professional services businesses located near the Railway Station and the London timetable allowed those professional services people to spend a lot of time in London each day and Venture Capitalist to come to Cambridge for a meeting, returning comfortably within the same day. Similar logic applies to the Business Park and others but they are filling. Muchof the pressure for Cambridge South and even East-West rail link to Oxford is driven by similar, albeit Life Science, considerations. These focus on the “length” of the office-client journey (the shorter the journey, the more visits per day productivity gain. With Cambridge North connected to the Science and Business Parks, Cambridge South soon to deal with Addenbrookes. Fulbourn/TWI etc appear to be the next candidate.

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Arguably we already allow some pretty bad uses in our villages (farming itself is a heavy NOx polluter, recycling plants impose odour and noise on their neighbours, and the heavy goods traffic generated by muckaway movements from new development) which should be reduced.

Cambridge does not face the tourism challenge of a Dubrovnik or Venice but it could ban large vehicles, including buses, from the central areas as many tourist areas do.