Battle over 1,500 extra homes heads for inquiry

DEVELOPERS and council leaders are set to go head to head later this month over a plan to increase the population of Cambourne by nearly 50 per cent.

The original plan by South Cambridgeshire District Council (SCDC) and a consortium of housing developers was to set a limit of 3,300 houses for the new settlement.

But the consortium put forward a plan for an extra 1,559 homes - dubbed Cambourne Enhanced - which would involve increasing the housing density of the final finished development and building some apartment blocks.

The plan was turned down by the council at a planning meeting last year but the developers appealed and on June 22 an eight-day public inquiry will be held at Cambourne to decide the matter.

John Slater, from Bovis Homes, denied the developers were breaking a promise by trying to build more than the planned number of houses in the village. He said "thought processes have changed" and it would be short-sighted to bin the proposals.

"There is a lot of misunderstanding about what 1,500 new homes will mean here," he said.

"The actual acreage of land that will be used will be the same, but the boundaries will be tweaked a little.

"Our precious resource is land and we need to maximise its use. We have the ability to get more houses on the existing space and it will mean we will have a development that creates greater value."

Daphne Spink, SCDC leader and local member for Cambourne, said having nearly 5,000 houses in Cambourne would make it a town rather than a village which was the original plan.

She said: "I shall be appearing at the hearing and speaking against Cambourne Enhanced because it goes against everything we have been planning for the last 10 years.

"We made a solemn promise in a full council meeting that Cambourne would not grow any bigger and the people who moved there were told it was going to be 3,300 houses.

"This was planned by South Cambs and by developers at the time as the size of village we could cope with.

"There is no station near there and any more houses means traffic would be pouring out onto the roads. It is like a knitting pattern - once you start you can't change it, you have to keep to the pattern."