When housing secretary Michael Gove set out plans to transform the university city of Cambridge last month, he asked his audience to dream big about “supercharging” the “science capital of Europe”.
His outlined a vision of a “new quarter” in the UK’s leading hub for life sciences, with networks of labs and thousands of affordable homes, set in green space that “rivals not just the royal parks of the capital but the best urban parks in the world”.
But from the response of local leaders, planning and property experts, it is clear that the challenges of the “Cambridge 2040” plan — part of the government’s much-vaunted ambition to turn the UK into a “science superpower” — are legion.
A lack of water and transport infrastructure, tight property market and strong community opposition to more house building will need to be overcome if Gove’s grandiloquent designs are to be turned into concrete reality.
“What we need is not another set of top-down targets or new visions, but help to deliver what we have already got planned,” said Stephen Kelly, director of planning for both South Cambridgeshire district council and Cambridge city council.
For Kelly, the vision overlooks the fact that Cambridge already has a plan to build 48,000 more houses by 2041 — in excess of the government’s own targets.
Greater Cambridge recently uprated its building targets by more than 7,000 homes to account for the 66,000 jobs the city’s planners anticipate will be created in the next 20 years by a boom in life science investment.
And yet, infrastructure shortages and housing affordability mean that far fewer houses will be completed than have been granted planning permission, according to the council’s projections.
In Eddington, two miles outside the city — named after the astronomer Sir Arthur Eddington — flats have been built using state of the art methods, with centralised recycling points and ultra-low water usage. But not all of the blocks have been sold.
Retail and hospitality lots remain vacant and the area’s small squares and public spaces are eerily quiet. “It just takes time to create authenticity and for the market to absorb new houses,” said Kelly.
Further afield, at the Waterbeach development on the northern outskirts of the city, permission has been granted for 6,500 homes on the site of an old air force base. But another 4,500 are being held up due to objections from the Environment Agency over a lack of water supply.
Even with infrastructure upgrades, the council expects that only about 5,000 will be built by 2041.
High inflation is also impacting the pace of housebuilding, according to Paul Mumford, project director at Urban & Civic, the master developer for Waterbeach.
Four-bedroom properties at the site will cost about £700,000 and two-bed flats around £290,000, prices that effectively limit the rate at which the market can absorb new houses.
“As a home builder, you generally hope to sell one home a week, at least that was the case a year ago,” he added. “But now it is about half that.”
Local government leaders wrote to Gove and Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor, in June to warn that water supply shortages risked “significantly undermining” the development plan.
The letter, seen by the Financial Times, urged ministers to expedite plans for two new reservoirs that are currently under consideration and to reverse a decision to block construction of a pipeline from Grafham Water reservoir about 20 miles north east of the city.
It warned that, without solutions, planning permissions for more than 9,000 homes, and 300,000 square metres of research space at Cambridge university could not be issued.
A further 380,000 sq m of commercial, research and development and lab space were also “at risk of not progressing”.
The government’s decision to refocus attention on the so-called “Golden Triangle” of Oxford, London and Cambridge represents a change of direction from Boris Johnson’s administration.
Johnson had put plans for a Oxford-Cambridge “Arc” on the backburner to prioritise spending on the government’s “levelling up” agenda to rebalance regional inequalities.
The decision to drop the Arc project also came after reports that it would require 1mn homes to be built, triggering strong local opposition.
In February 2022, a Cambridgeshire MP told constituents that Gove had mimed to him sitting on a lavatory and pulling the chain, saying: “That’s what’s happened to the Arc”. But in January, Sunak offered renewed backing for the plan.
Ministers have also committed to the East-West rail link, connecting Oxford and Cambridge via the distribution centre of Milton Keynes, reviving the idea of what was formerly known as the Varsity Railway.
Bridget Smith, leader of South Cambridgeshire district council who cosigned the letter, said the council welcomed the recent change of heart by Sunak’s government to concentrate investment on highly productive areas of the economy such as Cambridge.
However, she added that ministers needed to focus on delivering existing plans before announcing new ones.
“We have 50,000 houses already identified but because of Brexit labour shortages, cost of living and inflation in building materials, the rate of building has slowed considerably. The government needs to help speed up that delivery,” she said.
The Cambridge 2040 plan, which officials said could result in “as many as” 250,000 new homes being built, has also attracted stiff local opposition, including from Anthony Browne, the Conservative MP for South Cambridgeshire, who publicly described it as “ludicrous”.
In a letter addressed to Smith and Kelly last month, Browne warned that the “extraordinary scale” of housebuilding in South Cambridgeshire was “unsustainable” without improvements to transport and water infrastructure.
Still, the government said it is determined to push ahead with the plans, appointing Peter Freeman, chair of the affordable housing body Homes England, to lead a “delivery group” with a £5mn budget to begin “scoping work” for the new quarter.
Kelly said that potential sites for development included a large area that is currently Cambridge airport on the eastern borders of the city, and brownfield land to the north, which would require the relocation of a water treatment plant.
Homes England declined to comment on Freeman’s role, but the levelling up department said his group would now “work closely” with local people and council leaders, who were not consulted before the plan was briefed to the press, to deliver the vision.
“This means unblocking issues like water scarcity to support development where it makes sense, as well as shaping a vision for a new urban quarter that ensures people, places and businesses can together thrive,” the department added.
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