Month: July 2023

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DCO: Save Honey Hill’s Representation to the Planning Inspectorate

Double rainbow over a freshly ploughed field surrounded by green hedges.

The Save Honey Hill Group registered as an Interested Party (IP) sent our Representation to the Planning Inspectorate on Tuesday 18th July.

All 309 Representations have now been published. Go have a read of the many different ones from your neighbours and beyond. It is heartening to see such objective, personal and varied comments.

The Planning Inspectorate will inform all IPs of the timetable for the next stage – the Examination, which is likely to start in September.  At that stage anyone who has registered as an IP will be invited to make further comments in a Written Representation. We expect our barristers to give more input into that Representation.

During the Examination stage, which usually lasts six months, the Planning Inspectors will send questions to Anglian Water and to stakeholders for further information raised by the Representations. They will also hold issue-specific hearings.  We will keep you updated when we have more detail. There is more information on the NI website National Infrastructure Planning; all Representations will be published there shortly.

We are very grateful for your support and donations. We have budgeted for further advice but more income would give us confidence to use this even more effectively. So please spread the word to your friends and garner their support. More information on how to donate can be found on our website SHH – donate now.

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Press release from Save Honey Hill on Michael Gove’s speech

Long term Plan for Housing – Cambridge

"It has recently been reported in the national press that Michael Gove who has aspirations for our City along the lines of Silicon Valley and Boston, America, is seeking to supercharge development in our area. 

He said the city compared unfavourably with Boston - the US city and region that is home to a science cluster and some of the country's leading universities, such as Harvard and MIT.

It has been suggested development could include up to 250,000 new homes prompting Anthony Browne, MP for South Cambridgeshire, to call the plans 'nonsense'.

To put it in context: this would be five times the current number of dwellings in Cambridge City, twice the number currently in the City and South Cambs combined, the equivalent to 30 NECAAPS and 25 Waterbeach New Towns. At current building rates, 250,000 new homes would take 100 years to deliver.

It will be very interesting to hear what the local councils make of these aspirations and where will the water will come from?

In a government statement published yesterday, it talks about accelerating the sewage works relocation to unlock an entire new City quarter ie. NECAAP, but this is dependent on the success of the sewage works DCO application to relocate the works to Green Belt.

Michael Gove's Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities has stated that brownfield should be used for housing before Green Belt is taken and yet the irony of NECAAP is that a major piece of infrastructure is destined for Green Belt in order to serve up the required brownfield.

NECAAP has yet to go to public consultation and there is certainly no guarantee it will see the light of day in its current form of high rise, high density housing. We are extremely concerned that if this DCO is granted, we could face the prospect of the sewage works being relocated to Green Belt only to find further down the road that the NECAAP development doesn't go ahead or changes in such a way that the move wasn't necessary."