Cambridge - The next 20 years

Opinion | Our political columnist takes a look at what the next two decades might bring.

The problem with politics - at least, part of the problem with politics - is that very often it has to grapple with long term problems while facing a lot of short term pressures.

It’s tough to make progress on something which could take a decade or two to show results when you have to worry about next year’s elections, or next week’s newspaper headlines, or the next hour’s social media. So let’s take a step back from the concerns of day-to-day politics and take a look at some of the factors which will shape our city over the next 20 years.

Population

Cambridge’s population is international, young, and extremely mobile - at the last Census 38 per cent of the city’s residents were born overseas, the average age was just 31, and 24 per cent had moved house in the previous year.

These factors all look set to continue in the coming decades. The other thing we can be pretty sure about is that the population will keep growing, after rising by more than a third in the last 20 years.

The graph shows the county council’s population forecasts for Cambridge and nearby districts up to 2041 - and this is before adding in whatever proposals emerge from the Cambridge Growth Company (CGC).

Housing

While the pace of housebuilding in Cambridge isn’t quite as frenzied as it was 10 years ago, there’s a lot going on and plenty more in the pipeline, even before the CGC has developed its plans. In the next 20 years we are due to see most of the airport covered in new housing, and there’s likely to be a lot of pressure to replace existing housing with higher-density development. In a very interesting talk given last month by the CGC’s chair Peter Freeman, he compared the housing density of Cambridge - 15 dwellings per hectare - with that of Camden (55) and Islington (75).

Water

Another feature of Peter Freeman’s talk was the pressure on water supplies. While we are due to get a new pipeline from Grafham Water to Cambridge, and the government has recently announced that it wants to accelerate plans for a new reservoir near Chatteris, the CGC’s plans are likely to require more water than these projects will supply, with non-housing demand also likely to increase.

The Cambridge Water Scarcity Group has been set up to tackle this problem, but it’s very far from clear what the solution might look like, and what it will mean for Cambridge in 20 years’ time. Perhaps we might see “soft rationing” with households paying more for water supplies above a certain level.

Transport

By the mid-2040s, East West Rail and a number of heavily-contested busways into Cambridge will either have been completed or cancelled, and the GCP’s network of Greenway cycle routes will likely be in place. No doubt bikes, e-bikes and e-scooters will still be whizzing around the city’s streets. We might even manage another railway station, Cambridge East.

Beyond that, things are less certain. Light rail is certainly supported by mayor Paul Bristow, and Cambridge Connect has some well-developed proposals, but the big question is where the funding would come from. Perhaps the Cambridge Growth Company’s plans might be part of the answer.

Another open question is whether councillors will make any attempt to bring back some sort of road pricing plans to tackle the city’s chronic congestion problems. This seems to happen roughly every 15 years - there were “congestion metering” proposals in the early 1990s, the Transport Innovation Fund plans in 2007, and of course the bruising political showdown over the GCP’s congestion charge plans which ended in 2023. If there are going to be any new road pricing plans, I think they might come back a bit quicker next time.

Environment

During the next two decades we will reach some challenging target dates for carbon reduction plans. In 2019 the city council “shared a vision” for Cambridge to be net zero carbon by 2030, subject to the government implementing “necessary changes”, but this goal will certainly not be reached. The council does have a plan to reduce its own carbon emissions from council buildings and vehicles to net zero by 2030, but this represents only a tiny fraction of the city’s overall emissions.

The county council has a goal for the entire county to be net zero by 2045, but this too seems extremely unlikely to be achieved. Exactly what the effects of two more decades of climate change will be on Cambridge remains to be seen.

Economy

Whatever happens to Cambridge’s economy over the next two decades, it seems likely that life sciences, technology, education and tourism will all still have a very prominent role. The tumbleweed currently rolling through The Grafton centre, on the other hand, shows what a battering the retail sector has taken, and it’s clear that we won’t be going back to the days of Joshua Taylor and Eaden Lilley.

As with the rest of the world, a lot of economic uncertainty comes from the rise of AI. About 15 years ago, I remember chatting with a University of Cambridge professor of computer science who told me “machine learning is coming to change the world”. This change has certainly started - though it’s hard to tell whether we’ll all get rich from massive productivity gains, or end up hiding from killer robots in the rubble.

A key economic question for Cambridge is what will happen to the level of inequality in the city. It’s often said that Cambridge has the highest inequality of any UK city, and while this is partly because nobody has updated the statistics on this since 2018, I’m sure we’re still pretty high up the list. Even if inequality in the city does start to come down, it may just be because the eye-watering housing costs are pushing poorer people out.

University of Cambridge

Perhaps the most predictable aspect of the city’s next 20 years is that the University of Cambridge will still be enormously important. While the UK university sector as a whole is coming under a lot of pressure at the moment, with costs rising much faster than incomes, our local world-leading institution seems well placed to weather the storm. It has had more than 800 years of practice at planning for the very long term.

Local government

The changes currently under way in our system local government will almost certainly still be in place in 20 years’ time. Local government reorganisations do not come along very often, and the sweeping changes happening now are likely to endure for decades to come.

By the mid 2040s both Cambridge City Council and Cambridgeshire County Council will be fading memories, as will the GCP. Instead, some sort of Greater Cambridge council will be emptying our bins, fixing our potholes, and quite possibly fighting policy battles with the seventh or eighth mayor of the Combined Authority.

It’s rather harder to tell what the local political situation might look like, given the swirling turmoil of recent years. The city will probably still be well to the left of the rest of the county, and its long tradition of passionate engagement with political issues will surely continue. I wouldn’t be very surprised if the Green Party makes significant further advances locally in the next two decades.

The unexpected

Finally, it’s quite possible that some issues that just aren’t on the radar at the moment will have a big influence on Cambridge’s next 20 years. When Prime Minister Harold Macmillan was asked what was the greatest challenge for a statesman, he famously replied: “Events, dear boy, events”. The same goes for cities, and Cambridge is likely to face some challenging events in the coming decades.