Opinion: 57,000 new homes for Greater Cambridge? Where is the ‘delicate balance’ in that?

Opinion | Sarah Nicmanis, the Green Party’s Prospective parliamentary candidate for Cambridge, writes for the Cambridge Independent on the Local Plan, the question of growth and the impact on the environment.

Last week’s Cambridge Independent contained extensive coverage of what Labour, Lib Dem and Conservative politicians in our area have to say about plans for growth. Proposals in the Local Plan for 57,000 new homes in the Greater Cambridge area exceed the total number that currently exist in Cambridge. This growth agenda raises huge questions.

The first has to be: who is going to benefit? The sad truth is that very few of those who find themselves priced out of Cambridge by astronomical housing costs will be helped by these 57,000 new homes.

Contrary to what is often assumed, high house prices are not driven by scarcity alone, but by interest rates that until recently have been historically low and by an attitude that treats our homes as investments rather than as places to live. This contributes to worrying bubble-like aspects of the housing market.

The groups that benefit from large-scale housebuilding are developers and landowners, who have an interest in keeping prices high. If building more houses brought the price down they would soon stop.

Anthony Browne, the Conservative MP for South Cambridgeshire, rails against housing targets that he blames his Lib Dem opponents for. But let’s remember that eye-watering national housing targets were set by the Conservative central government.

Government policy has encouraged the treatment of housing as a form of speculative investment, rather than a basic requirement for individual and social well-being – an approach long criticised by the Greens. Green policy in this area includes a targeted land tax to discourage speculation and additional supports for public housing and for renters.

The second but equally important question is: can our environment actually support this level of growth?

Cllr Bridget Smith, the Lib Dem leader of South Cambridgeshire District Council, is quoted as saying that “there is a delicate balance to be struck” between building new homes and protecting the environment. The current plans are hardly “delicate” and there is currently no “balance” at all. The natural world is losing out across the board to the forces of human development. But in the end we are not separate from the rest of nature and we will suffer if we continue to destroy the surroundings on which we ultimately depend.

In September 2021, Natural England issued advice to planning authorities in Sussex that means that all planning applications have to demonstrate water neutrality. This means that the use of water in the affected area has to be the same or lower after a new development as before.

The area in question is the Arun valley, which includes sites of Outstanding Natural Beauty and of Special Scientific Interest and which, in the view of Natural England, is threatened by the over-abstraction of water from the aquifers under the South Downs.

The parallels with the Cam valley are clear. Development is already harming the ecologically valuable chalk streams in our area. The chalk streams function as a canary in the coal mine – a warning of much bigger dangers to come. Cambridge and South Cambridgeshire Green Party has written to Natural England to ask if a similar approach needs to be adopted here.

Ultimately, we need to question the whole idea that continued growth for its own sake is either desirable or even possible. Is growth on this scale compatible with our continued flourishing as a society? It seems that the Greens are the only party that is willing to be truly realistic about the challenges that lie ahead.

The Green vision – the thing that distinguishes the Greens from all the other parties – starts from the realisation that we will only flourish if we start with the environment and stop treating it as an afterthought.

Greens believe that we need to question the whole idea of a growth-driven future, both here in Cambridge and on our planet as a whole.