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The next round of hearings for the Local Plan Examinations for Bourn Airfield start on 4 April 2017 at South Cambridgeshire Hall in Cambourne. In preparation for these hearings, the Inspector has produced a series of questions ("Matters and Issues") for inclusion in the examination and has invited responses from interested parties. The deadline for these responses was yesterday, 16 February. StopBAD (as well as the Coalition of Parish Councils led by Bourn Parish Council) has made detailed and updated submissions responding to these questions. In a series of updates here, we are releasing our submissions on a section by section basis for your reference, beginning with the matter of site sustainability regarding employment. [If you would like to download a copy of the full submission, see below]. 
StopBAD Statement in response to Matter SC6C - Policy SS/6 i. Does the site represent a sustainable location in respect of the proximity and accessibility to key centres of employment? The answer to this question is clearly no. As illustrated in Figure 1 and Figure 2 the key employment centres are in Cambridge City itself, at the Science Park off Milton Road, at Addenbrookes and the Biomedical Campus, and further south at the Babraham Research Campus and Granta Park. At the moment there are in the region of 118,500 jobs at these 5 sites. Furthermore, the concentration of employment at these sites is set to significantly increase with plans already in place to employ 30,000 people on the Biomedical Campus. The only significant employers near the Bourn Airfield site are the South Cambridge District Council and Papworth Hospital - which will relocate 2000 jobs to the Biomedical Campus next year (2018). There is now universal consensus among statutory bodies and observers that R&D Health Sciences companies and agencies will look increasingly to work in close proximity with one another and consequently there is little prospect that this pattern of employment dispersal will change. Bourn Airfield is not a sustainable distance away from the main centres of employment and represents an over-concentration of housing development away from the main centres of employment.  Figure 1: Distribution of major centres of employment Cambridge and South Cambridgeshire  Figure 2: Royal Town Planning Institute Map of Major Employment Clusters (Cambridge)[1] Wessex Economics' conducted the Cambourne Employment Sites Study[2] on behalf of the developers of West Cambourne and concluded that “the lack of recent office development is an indication that Cambourne has fallen out of favour as an office location. This is confirmed by trends reported in the most recent Employment Land Review undertaken for SCDC and CCC. The great majority of large scale office occupiers want to be in Cambridge itself, while biotech firms are drawn to business parks to the south of Cambridge.” More damning still for the prospects of Bourn Airfield as a sustainable location was the admission by Wessex Economics that “an expanded employment base in Cambourne would be unlikely to significantly increase self-containment in the sense that a much higher proportion of people will live and work in Cambourne.” They conclude “there is not a strong planning rationale for seeking to ensure a balance of jobs and homes in a relatively small settlement such as Cambourne”. The great majority, 75.9%, of Cambourne residents travel to work by car[3]. Bus use remains low (about 5%) and, apart from a tiny minority of hardy and fit enthusiasts, cycling to work is not an option and walking is completely impractical because of the distances involved. Prospects for improved accessibility to Cambridge and the business parks to the south, took a considerable blow recently when Highways England confirmed that they would not be re-considering their decision NOT to build an all-ways interchange at Girton. This effectively means that eastbound A428 traffic heading to Addenbrookes and the southern biotech campuses, either gets caught up in the severe congestion on Madingley Hill, or takes evasive routes through the villages to access the M11 further south. Eastbound A428 traffic would lose its existing dual carriageway access to the north of Cambridge to be replaced by a single lane slipway. The prioritising of westbound A14 traffic will worsen substantially the situation for eastbound A428 traffic just at the time when A428 traffic is set to substantially increase.  Figure 3: Highways Agency proposed A14/M11/A428 junction [1] http://www.rtpi.org.uk/locationofdevelopment [2] Information on file at SCDC. [3] Data from Cambridgeshire County Council 2011 census. 75.9% of working people drive directly or drive to a train station. We will add further submitted responses to the other questions here over the coming days. In the meantime please do make a note of the timetable:
Tuesday 4th April - 10am and 2pm at South Cambridgeshire Hall, Cambourne - The New Village at Bourn Airfield Wednesday 5th April 10am and 2pm - Site Visits Thursday 6th April 10am and 2pm - Continuation sessions if required.
1 Comment
John Newby
17/2/2017 11:27:32 pm
I chose to live in a rural community (Caldecote), in spite of its lack of amenities, as a lover of the British countryside. I deplore the threat of urban sprawl from Madingley to Caxton Gibbet with no improvement in amenities or public transport except for the urban dwellers of the ugly new recent and proposed developments. Localism is just a weasel word. Leave a Reply. |
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