-----Original
Message-----
From: Andy Weeks [mailto:andy_weeks@ntlworld.com]
Sent: 25 October 2002 17:14
To: Huntington Michael
Subject: Cambourne High Street
Good afternoon Mike,
First let me introduce myself, I am treasurer of Cambourne Residents Association and also one of the delegated residents who meets monthly with the developers' representatives (Ian and David).
As such I would appreciate your perspective on the ongoing saga of the shop units earmarked for Cambourne High Street. The latest position from the developers is that these units are still held up within SCDC, in spite of legal documentation having been readied for signing. Does this concur with your department's understanding ? I believe that Jane may have been handling this matter prior to her maternity leave
To the best of my knowledge the original stated intention was that these units would have been occupied and used at least for the start of this year, and certainly in advance of Morrisons. With the best will in the world, we, the residents, are now faced with a woeful two-year delay by the time the units become functional. I am sure that you will agree that this does not help to convey the image of a village developing from a core nucleus. Currently there is a large new Morrisons store adrift in a muddy field with no other facilities around it. Was it not also the case that Morrisons was dissuaded from offering add-on concessions in its building such as postal services, dry cleaning and banking to allow other operators to establish themselves in the High Street units ?
I am told that these unspecified delays are jeopardising the potential funding of some of the proposed tenants.
I would be interested to hear your side of the story and any projections for timescales and resolutions to what has seemingly become a knotty and ingrained problem. After all, all the residents are asking for is the facilities that they were promised for the end of 2001 !
Kind regards
Andy Weeks
13 Elm Tree Close
Cambourne
CB3 6AN
01954 205791
07967 750096
Dear Andy,
thanks for the email. I would be delighted to give you the Council's version of events. What I am going to explain is a little complicated and deals in planning law, so if it is difficult to understand, please ask me to clarify whichever elements you wish.
The applicant for the shops and offices at the junction of Broad Street and School Lane is Alfred McAlpine Special Projects. This is a different firm from McAlpine Homes, as the homebuilder is now part of George Wimpey plc. That is the first bit of confusion.
The issue has now been condensed into a legal matter over whether the planning application for the shops and offices should be a FULL (F) or a RESERVED MATTER (RM) application. A Reserved Matter application offers details of siting, design, means of access, and landscaping, and follows approval of an OUTLINE (O) application. Cambourne was an OUTLINE application, and most of the other applications are RESERVED MATTERS applications. The legal issue is that as the outline permission for Cambourne did not specifiy offices in the settlement centre, and so we are of the opinion that a FULL application is needed for this application. The difference between a Full and a Reserved Matter is that in a Full application matters of principle can be attached, such as restricting the types of shops and creating a vibrant streetscene etc. The principle of offices has been accepted in the masterplan, but the masterplan is not the planning permission, and that is the issue that the Council's legal officer has given advice on. Other buildings within the settlement centre have been FULL applications, such as the day nursery and the joint services building (library / doctors').
The planning application was accepted as a Reserved Matter application in June 2001, after pre-application discussions which had resulted, in my opinion, an attractive building. I then helpfully sent a DRAFT planning permission to the applicant suggesting planning conditions. Planning conditions normally enable the development or the use of the land to be controlled. Some of the conditions were not acceptable to the developers' consortium, and we obviously thought the conditions were reasonable. Some of these conditions related to 1) knowing what the ground floor mix of units would be (a reasonable mix of A1 {shops}, A2 {financial and professional services such as estate agents} and A3 {food and drink}), 2) ensuring that the shops would not be able to amagamate at a later date without planning permission (to ensure that the high street shops would retain a mix of sizes and retain an air of activity that you would not get if the shops were larger, and 3) ensuring that the developer created a green travel plan to try to encourage employees to use methods other than the car to get to work.
The developer argued that these conditions were not valid on a RM application. After seeking legal advice we were informed that we should not have accepted the application in the first place as a RM application, and it should be turned into a FULL application, and these conditions would then be valid.
These arguments have been going back and forth for about 12 months now. At a meeting held last month with myself, Jane Green, Ian Douglas and David Chare, we agreed a way forward to extricate everyone from these three conditions by a 'memorandum of understanding', and the meeting was constructive and amicable. However in the detail of discussing the three conditions we all neglected to discuss the issue of the full / reserved matter nature of the permission. As the conditions with which the developer had a problem had now been sorted out, the issue of whether the application should be a Full / Reserved Matter should therefore have been I would have thought not a problem to the developer. A letter was written to the developers on 17th September, and to date we have not had a response. This issue had not been a problem to either the Day Nursery developer or the County Council for the library / health centre.
With regard to the supermarket, it was important that Morrisons was restricted in what it could sell because if not the future of the High Street could have been ham strung.
I am also unaware of the situation with the potential occupiers, although I would have thought that now with the supermarket open and more residents moving in, the shop units would be more attractive to tenants. I also understand that it would take about 8 months to construct the building, although I am not sure whether that it includes fitting out.
I hope this helps, and please ask me if you need any more clarification.
regards,
Mike