Steven Kosky, planning director for Turley, assesses the Government’s recent decision not to fund the relocation of the North Cambridge Waste Water Treatment Works and its implications for the future growth of the Cambridge area.
The Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) has recently confirmed that Government funding will now not be forthcoming to support the planned relocation of the Anglian Water Waste Water Treatment Plant from its existing site in north east Cambridge to a new treatment site, north of the A14.
This, somewhat unexpected, decision not only creates a major infrastructure deficit headache for the future, but also fundamentally undermines a significant raft of the emerging Cambridge growth area spatial strategy.
The planned relocation of the Waste Water Treatment Plant and the need for a Development Consent Order (DCO) to enable its relocation, has already had a major influence on the future timing and delays which have so far beset the emerging Greater Cambridge Local Plan.
In addition, some £80 million has already been spent on the relocation project by the joint authorities, including a £13m contribution from Cambridge City Council, in an attempt to help free up land for around 8,500 new homes on the future vacated brownfield site.
The DCO to relocate the existing treatment plant was approved in April 2025 which, at the time, appeared to be the green light for both the consented development and the emerging spatial strategy to take a major step forward.
However, in deciding not to fund the relocation, MHCLG publicly stated that the costs of the relocation have increased too significantly as a result of the rising costs of materials and labour and the disruption to global supply chains.
As such, MHCLG now says that these combined increases simply makes the scheme unaffordable. As a result of the recent funding decision, proposals for the new ‘Hartree’ development on the existing site, proposed by Cambridge City Council and Anglian Water, will therefore not be delivered.
The Hartree masterplan planning application for the development was also already in progress and was intended to form the heart of a proposed new urban district for North East Cambridge.
This proposed new district will now have to be substantially re-conceived, without the Hartree scheme. The net development loss to the spatial strategy is around 8,500 new homes, two schools, community, cultural, leisure and health facilities, and over 19 hectares of open space.
At this stage it is unclear to what extent the remainder of the wider new district scheme can accommodate some of the new housing and the required new community infrastructure that will otherwise not be delivered.
Going forward it may be that other nearby promoted sites, which were not previously selected for allocation and development, may be able to collectively come forward in order help make up some of the housing shortfall.
The first port of call will be for the two local authorities to engage with key stakeholders, including the Cambridge Growth Company, to assess the extent and future role of further development opportunities that lie within the North East Cambridge area.
However, the scale of this unexpected planned new housing deficit is now an additional layer to the already well-known wider growth pressures in the Cambridge area, which considerably exceed the more conservative scale parameters of the emerging spatial strategy.
Therefore, a longer-term, comprehensive, sustainable growth solution is needed, in addition to any further allocations made in the currently emerging Greater Cambridge Local Plan.
This inevitably points to a network of further larger scheme solutions, both adjacent to, and beyond Cambridge, which is a spatial strategy which has served Cambridge well in the past, and which has also helped to maintain and preserve the integrity of the historic parts of the city.
However, even with larger scheme solutions, the issue of wider waste water infrastructure deficit will still remain unresolved. Consequently, the larger scale new developments of the future will potentially have to ‘wipe their own face’ (avoiding the more obvious colloquialism) in terms of providing sustainable, on-site, foul water treatment.
This, in itself, is not logistically or technically beyond the scope of modern, strategic scale development and numerous examples of private waste water treatment facilities do exist throughout the UK and elsewhere in Europe.
However, there may be viability implications in providing such infrastructure within schemes of insufficient critical mass. This suggests that the most viable proposals are going to need to be either of sufficient scale, or be part of a wider network of linked developments, which can collectively deliver and share new private waste water infrastructure.
The delivery of more self-sufficient new development schemes, either in unison or in linked partnership, could therefore provide a more sustainable solution to the current waste water and other infrastructure deficits that exist in Cambridge, whilst also creating a future template for more comprehensively planned, net zero development in the Cambridge growth area.
In the meantime, smaller and intermediate development schemes will still be needed in the Cambridge area, given the longer lead in times necessary for more strategic developments.
These early delivery schemes will be essential to help maintain the continuity of housing delivery in Cambridge, until such time as the longer-term and more comprehensive development solutions become fully available.
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