Resident’s plea to Michael Gove over big ‘silicon valley’ growth

As one in all Cambridge’s 150,000 residents, I used to be shocked to be taught by way of a Whitehall news leak of Michael Gove’s blueprint to show our famously historic city into the brand new city megalopolis.

The Housing Secretary is outwardly not content material with the already controversial (and upwardly revised) housebuilding ambitions detailed within the Cambridge native plan for targets of fifty,000-plus new houses by 2040.

Nor with the truth that new residence improvement in Greater Cambridge presently outpaces virtually some other space within the UK and outperforms the nationwide common by thrice.

Mr Gove and his Whitehall officers have decided that Cambridge’s future is to turn out to be, based on one supply, “the Silicon Valley of Europe” – to which finish they suggest hijacking the native plan and, based on the identical supply, “putting it on steroids”.

That supply isn’t exaggerating: Gove’s expansionist imaginative and prescient would see the inhabitants measurement of our college city improve five-fold from its present 150,000 to 750,000, skyrocketing it to the UK’s third largest metropolis.

That is behind solely London and Birmingham in inhabitants phrases and dwarfing Glasgow, Liverpool and Manchester, amongst others.

Where we dwell and the group that surrounds us can in so some ways decide the standard, even the length, of our lives. It follows that nowhere ought to self-determination, in respect of coverage selections impacting us, be stronger than selections which straight have an effect on our native communities.

Gove and PM Rishi Sunak eulogise a couple of Haussmann-designed city quarter. But progress on this scale isn’t a lot an city quarter as an asphalt conurbation bolted onto a inhabitants a fifth of its measurement and improvement manifestly on a transformative scale for the character, heritage and panorama of Cambridge and its surrounding areas.

Hollow phrases about “growing beautiful integrated neighbourhoods” go away one in little doubt Gove can’t have seen for himself the myriad Legoland-style estates arising on the outskirts of city.

Reassurances that the goal is enabling “brownfield development rather than green belt erosion” evaporate on first contact with actuality…as one environmental group factors out: “Cambridge is not particularly well endowed with brownfield sites.”

Leaving apart the query of how proposals to show an already comparatively rich metropolis right into a cash-cow for housing builders may be mentioned to satisfy a “levelling-up” agenda, the proposals exhibit a surprising, maybe wilful, ignorance of the environmental constraints and infrastructure deficits of the realm.

As any native would have instructed Gove, crippling congestion chokes every main artery into the city most days.

Rush-hour journeys of no quite a lot of miles right into a metropolis centre devoid of normal and dependable public transport choices ought to take quarter-hour, however routinely take over an hour.

Cambridge’s heralding as a bikeable metropolis par excellence is baffling to these of us who really cycle right here. Narrow, potholed bike lanes render a lot of the routes into town centre hazardous to cyclists, particularly these of us with younger youngsters. Schools, bursting on the seams, routinely have lengthy ready lists. When we first moved right here 4 years in the past, we had been confronted with a two-plus 12 months watch for the native main.

Six years after the primary residents moved into the Cambridge new city of Northstowe, it nonetheless doesn’t have a single store, cafe or GP surgical procedure.

Even if central authorities mandarins handle to muster up the aptitude to trend a shining citadel boasting thrice as many houses, faculties, transport hyperlinks and facilities than have been constructed within the two millennia for the reason that Romans first arrived in South Cambs in 70 AD, there’s the small matter of the water provide.

Such are the issues about water shortage, the Environment Agency is, for the primary time in its historical past, objecting to all main planning functions in Greater Cambridge.

To get off the bottom, even in Westminster’s rose-tinted bubble, the proposals have needed to overtly permit for a watering down (pun supposed) of present environmental and air pollution protections – a transfer the Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs is fiercely towards.

It is a driving roughshod over the native atmosphere that’s symbolic of a extra generalised lack of regard and engagement with the group.

In a letter to Gove final week, South Cambridgeshire MP Anthony Browne mentioned if Gove’s division had spoken to native representatives “they would have been told categorically that development on this scale is completely and utterly impossible to deliver for many reasons, not least because we simply don’t have enough water.”

Such full lack of session with both Browne or native authorities could be astonishing had been it not for the truth that Westminster makes no try to cover its unprecedented land-grab.

“So this Government will now start to write the next, expansive, chapter in Cambridge’s story of scientific endeavour ”, gushes Gove.

And that is exactly the purpose. Gove, one in all 4 ministers chargeable for key pandemic selections, ought, greater than most, to know selections made behind closed doorways, with out the enter of these most affected, with out session of these most versed and vested within the consequence, usually tend to be flawed.

Judging by the near-universal fury from all sides of the group final week, there’s scant probability proposals which sign a transformative and everlasting scarring of primarily a complete county would move any native decision-making check.

MP Browne rightly chastised: “It is…very difficult to understand how the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, knowing all this, can think that drastically increasing housebuilding in our area is in any respect a wise, credible or feasible plan.”

It is a disgrace these in Westminster didn’t trouble to ask him.