Peter Freeman of Homes England to Head Cambridge ‘Super Squad’ as @createstreets release horrible ugly ‘Unenglish’ Viz which looks more like France than England

Cambs Live and Create Streets

These look nothing like Cambridge

Mock-up images created by a social enterprise show what proposed development in Cambridge could look like. The Government announced proposals to create a ‘new urban quarter’ in the city on Monday (July 24) as part of a manifesto commitment to build one million homes over this Parliament.

A spokesperson for the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (DLUHC) said plans for Cambridge include a “new quarter of well-designed, sustainable and beautiful neighbourhoods for people to live in, work and study”. They said this would include laboratories, commercial developments, life science facilities, and country parkland.

Social enterprise Create Streets made mock-ups showing what a ‘new urban quarter‘ in Cambridge could look like. Create Streets says it prioritises ‘gentle density’ when considering design and development.

A spokesperson for Create Streets said: “Today Michael Gove announced plans for a Cambridge New Quarter to boost UK prosperity and create desperately needed new homes. We would argue passionately that this should be beautiful and sustainable, a network of streets & squares, homes, offices and labs – a lovely place to live, work and play.”

A ‘Cambridge Delivery Group’ chaired by Peter Freeman and backed by £5million will be established to begin work on the proposals. A DLUHC spokesperson said: “The Group will work to turn this vision into a reality, taking a lead on identifying the housing, infrastructure, services and green space required.

The Government has announced proposals for a new urban quarter in Cambridge (Image: Create Streets)

“It will also consider options for an appropriate delivery mechanism that will be needed to lead the long-term work on planning, land acquisition and engagement with developers, starting in this Parliament but running through the next few years as development takes shape. In the meantime, the Delivery Group will take forward immediate action to address barriers such as water scarcity across the city.”

The Government plan also includes establishing an ‘Office for Place’ in Stoke-on-Trent, chaired by the founder of Create Streets, Nicholas Boys Smith. A DLUHC spokesperson said the Office for Place will aim to “support residents to demand what they find beautiful from developers – ensuring every local place is built to reflect the individual local character and beauty of every community across the country”.

Here Comes Gove’s Cambridge Supersquad

Cambridge News

Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities Michael Gove has set out measures to ‘unblock’ the planning system and build more homes in areas with local consent. A spokesperson for the Department of Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (DLUHC) said the government would focus on building in inner-city areas where demand is high – such Cambridge, central London, and central Leeds.

They said: “This includes a new urban quarter in Cambridge which will unlock the city’s full potential as a source of innovation and talent. Working with local leaders and communities in Cambridge, a new quarter will create new beautiful homes, supported by state of the art facilities with cutting-edge laboratories and green spaces.”

And we can exclusively reveal the new super team here

Led by The Gossiper

Superpower – ability to get stories in newspaper by gossiping to hi former colleagues at Murdoch Press. Ability to mesmirise with his skills at Acid House dancing.

Sword Girl

Superpower ability to hold swords for hours

The Michael Green Lantern

Superpower – to force Labour Mayoprs to introduce policies he knows will lose them votes

Aquasludge

Super power – no sense of smell

The Ex Joker

Looking for work

The Lettice

Super Power: Ability to double mortgage rates

Mr 2D

Super power. Wafer thin beliefs

Dr BellEnd

What is your super power? ‘Being rich’

Cambridge Super Squad

AJ

Gove is setting up a new “super-squad” team of leading planners and other experts charged with working across the planning system to unblock major housing developments.

The team will first be deployed in Cambridge to turbocharge plans in the city.

South Cambridgeshire Anthony Browne has tweeted: “I will do everything I can to stop the government’s nonsense plans to impose mass housebuilding on Cambridge, where all major developments are now blocked by the Environment Agency because we have quite literally run out of water.”

Do you really need a ‘super squad’ to tell you your phasing policy should kick in when new resevoirs come on stream in a decade?

Cambridge City Leader Calls Gove’s 250,000 Home Plan ‘Absurd’ but is it?

All kicked off by Sunday Times report

Whatis source of sicrepency

Well the government is looking over 20 years not 10 or 15, which outs it into preiod where new reservoirs will solve water problem

Also derives from the never published AECOM report – which of course when Gove announces plan will become FOI able. Which covers a broader geography including BEDS border and growth of Milton Keynes into Bedforshire.

Yes there are sites adding up to total growth on 250k in this region. Ive studied them myself.

Mirror

A council leader said an alleged plan to build 250,000 new homes in Cambridge was “absurd”.

Mike Davey, from Cambridge City Council, said he was “shocked” to read a Sunday Times article about Michael Gove’s apparent plans for the city.

He said the authority needed to find out if there was “anything of any substance” in the reports.

The government said it would “work with local communities to build more of the right homes in the right places”.

The newspaper reported that a Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (DLUHC) document called “Cambridge 2040” proposed building the homes over two decades to support investment in the sciences and technology sectors.

It was part of the housing secretary’s project to turn Cambridge into the “Silicon Valley of Europe”, it said.

The plans “envisaged a huge expansion” of Cambridge and the surrounding area, which has about 150,000 residents, it added.

Labour councillor, Mr Davey, said it was “the first [the council had] heard of it”.

“The fact that it’s described by the Sunday Times as a concept from Michael Gove probably tells you that it’s not had a great deal of thought put behind it to date,” he said.

“We need to go back to Mr Gove’s civil servants and find out if there is anything behind this of any substance.”

He said chief executive Robert Pollock would be asking the DLUHC what the true situation was and why the alleged plans were “leaked in this way”.

“Usually when you want to do something as important as this proposal you talk to the city council, you talk to South Cambridgeshire District Council and have a discussion about what is and isn’t feasible,” he said.

“On the grounds of what was in the paper… the proposal seems to be quite absurd… because 250,000 homes in Cambridge and Cambridgeshire doesn’t make sense.

“It’s very difficult to respond in a cogent way until we get the better detail.

“We’re currently going through a local plan process and the current proposals are for 50,000 homes, which we think will be a bit of a stretch anyway.”

He added that any growth had to be sustainable and any plans had to look at the environmental impact.

Mr Davey said he had highlighted the area’s “incredible need for water” to Mr Gove about six weeks ago, but had not yet had a response.

“Rather than announcing odd plans about building 250,000 homes, a better response would have been to talk to us about what the water requirements are for the existing commitments we already have.

“I just think it’s slapdash and silly.”

Anthony Browne, MP for South Cambridgeshire, also said he would fight the alleged housing plan.

A DLUHC spokesman said it would be working with local communities and knew that “development is only welcomed when new homes are beautiful and built alongside new GP surgeries, schools and transport links”.

“Our reforms have democracy, environmental enhancement and new neighbourhoods at their heart and will help us reach our target of one million new homes this Parliament,” a statement said.

Gove Backs Cambridge Growth Plan at ‘5 Minutes before Midnight’ of Conservative Government

Guardian

There are times in politics when a party just has to go for broke. But those times are not necessarily when it is winning.

It’s when the game is finally up, and defeat looks virtually guaranteed, that for some politicians there can be a weird feeling of liberation. The choice is now between hanging around waiting miserably for the inevitable, or grasping a few nettles on the way out – by which I mean tackling the things previously shoved into a box marked “too difficult”.

The one cabinet minister in an otherwise paralysed-looking Conservative government who appears to show even a glimmer of this end-of-life spirit is Michael Gove. The secretary of state for levelling up, housing and communities is reportedly mulling plans to build a quarter of a million houses by 2040 in and around Cambridge – a small but beautiful city that’s one of the most expensive places to live in Britain – under proposals to turn the area’s science and tech cluster into the British equivalent of Silicon Valley. (If I had a pound for every time somewhere in Britain was going to be the new Silicon Valley, I’d be writing this from a Malibu beach house, but that’s another story.)

And while the idea of making a prosperous city in the south-east even more prosperous is admittedly not exactly how levelling up the economy was pitched, new housing and regeneration schemes are supposedly also in the pipeline for the likes of Sheffield, Blackpool and Wolverhampton – identified as locations that could be much more economically successful than they are.

The so-called Cambridge 2040 plan is tactfully described as being at “concept” stage – code for “may never happen”. The city council certainly says it has not yet been consulted and perhaps the whole thing will simply be strangled at birth or else drastically watered down, given the likely resistance in Tory-voting rural Cambridgeshire to new housing on an explosive scale. (The South Cambridgeshire MP, Anthony Browne, has already declared that “needless to say, I will be fighting it”.)

But the blueprint would still be there to pick up and tweak if an incoming Labour government felt like taking the heat for it, on the grounds that if all parties say they want to build more houses then they have to mean it and they also have to build where people want or need to live. The alternative may be somewhere like Cambridge becoming Britain’s equivalent of the San Francisco Bay area in the worst of all possible ways: somewhere tech money has driven house prices way beyond ordinary mortals’ reach, with dystopian consequences.

This particular plan is obviously not perfect. Gove is said to favour building on brownfield rather than virgin greenfield land, which is less politically toxic but also makes it harder to build properly affordable housing (cleaning up whatever was on the site before adds to the cost for developers, shrinking their margins). Though in private he’s said to be broadly enthusiastic about building more social housing, we have heard little about that in public.

But while Rishi Sunak dumped plans for centrally imposed local housing targets last year, fearful of a backlash in the shires, the housing minister, Rachel Maclean, has been adamant that doesn’t mean the overall target to build more homes is dead. If nothing else, this looks like the beginnings of a strategy for resuscitating it from Gove, one of the more activist housing secretaries this government has yet produced – and the only one who sounds as if he may have a vaguely coherent plan for tying all that together with economic growth outside London. How infuriating, then, that it’s all emerging only at five minutes to midnight after three-and-a-half wasted years, and that it could be a decade before all this starts to bear fruit.

A cynic may wonder whether this is just a last-ditch attempt to buy millennial votes or even to reposition Gove in advance of what is likely to be an angry post-election debate within his party about why the Tories didn’t do more for priced-out younger voters. (Though given the enthusiasm with which the Lib Dems are now targeting Gove’s Surrey seat, he can’t count on being around to take part in that one.)

But it remains just possible that the ever pragmatic Gove has woken up and smelled the coffee. The country may still not be entirely sure about Labour, which is why Keir Starmer is tiptoeing so cautiously towards the election. But it seemingly knows exactly what it thinks about the Tories and there’s an odd kind of freedom to be found for this government in accepting that if the end is probably nigh anyway, it might as well do whatever it can with the time it has got left.