Save Honey Hill campaigners to seek judicial review of government approval for Cambridge sewage works move

Campaigners aim to launch a legal challenge to the government’s decision to relocate Cambridge’s sewage works onto Green Belt land.

The Save Honey Hill group has begun fundraising to pay for a potential judicial review, pointing out that the government’s own planning inspectors advised against the move.

They say they want to stop taxpayers’ money being spent on moving a “fully functioning sewage works when it doesn’t need to be moved”.

Steve Reed, the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, approved a plan to replace the current Cambridge Waste Water Treatment Plant in the north-east of the city with one on land to the north of the A14 between Horningsea and Fen Ditton, known as Honey Hill.

His decision came despite the Planning Inspectorate, which examined the plans, recommending withholding consent as there was “not a convincing case” to justify the new sewage works and it would cause “substantial” harm to the green belt.

The purpose of the move is to unlock plans for housing and commercial buildings at North East Cambridge, where Anglian Water’s plant currently lies. The water company applied for a Development Consent Order (DCO).

The sewage works site itself would form part of the Hartree development, where developers have been working on plans to build around 5,000 new homes. No planning approval has yet been given.

Hartree would form part of the wider North East Cambridge site, which could eventually feature up to 8,000 homes.

The government has committed £277million to the project to build the new sewage works, with the overall cost estimated to be around £400million.

Save Honey Hill, which has fought the plans for five years, says the move would devastate “valuable agricultural land”, adding: “Anglian Water wants to move its plant about one mile down the road from its existing site. The planning inspectors made clear that there are no guarantees about what, if anything, will be built on the site once the sewage plant is moved. They noted that the redevelopment is not part of this application, that no planning permission exists for any future scheme, and that the Development Consent Order includes no mechanism to ensure anything goes ahead.

“Despite this uncertainty, the impact on the green belt would be permanent.”

The campaigners set an initial fundraising target of £3,500 to fund a pre-action protocol letter, a formal legal step needed before they can bring a Judicial Review.

This target has already been exceeded, with the group reaching the £5,000 mark by Monday evening.

“That initial £3,500 has enabled us to achieve our first goal of stating our case to the Secretary of State with the help of legal expertise,” said the group, in a message thanking its supporters.

“We are now looking ahead to the next stages of the Judicial Review process, which again requires significant input from the legal team and to this end, we are looking to raise £16,000 by May 18, 2025 to cover this cost.”

The Secretary of State argued the relocation of the sewage works would “unlock a long-held ambition to redevelop North East Cambridge” and would “enable the delivery of thousands of new homes and new jobs in a highly sustainable location where development has been frustrated for decades by the presence of the existing waste water treatment plant”.

But Save Honey Hill argues: “We have shown that any housing that might be built on the vacated site would be extremely poor value for money and not ‘sustainable’ because of the high whole-life carbon footprint and financial cost per home.”

The campaigners point to the fact that Anglian Water’s own study proves the carbon cost of dismantling the current site to be huge.

And Anglian Water admitted to the Planning Inspectorate that there was not an “operational need or requirement for greater capacity” and that the existing plant could be upgraded to increase capacity.

The inspectors told the Secretary of State that “very special circumstances do not exist to justify the approval of inappropriate development in the green belt”.

Save Honey Hill, which has a community choir that has recorded songs protesting the move, adds: “This is no longer a local issue. It’s a national issue. When government goes against the experts, we should all be worried.”

You can contribute to the fundraiser at savehoneyhill.org.

Additional reporting: Hannah Brown, Local Democracy Reporter.