Utterly disappointed but so not surprised. I’m gutted for the town planners on the GCSP and city council, along with the planning committee, to whom this decision must feel like an epic slap in the face after the decision on the Flying Pig Pub.
You can read the papers here. This is the impact of the Government’s inability to properly regulate the land and property markets. Furthermore it reflects the inability of ministers to ensure councils have sufficient resources and powers to acquire locally historical sites and turn them into facilities or the types of homes that communities, towns, and cities require in the eyes of the people that make them up. Instead we have the overcrowding of another development of ‘apart-hotels’ which again local councils have few powers to tax and pay for much-needed local services. Furthermore, the limited capacity to enforce planning conditions means that some are barely worth the paper they are printed on.
“Councillor Katie Porrer said the plans offered “lots of extra rooms”, but did not offer extra benefits for the community. Councillor Martin Smart said he thought the development was “ugly” and said the plans were a “betrayal of what this club was first built for”. The developer appealed to the planning inspectorate, which has now overturned the city council’s decision.”
Cambridge News 12 Sept 2023
I also made this video back in April 2023.
“What happens now?”
Expect to see the site now be put up for sale with the new planning permission and added units attached. Only that’s what happened last time. And that’s what happened to the old Flying Pig Pub site after a Planning Inspector overturned the refusal of the Pace Investments’ application – one that generated 15,000 signatures in a petition against the development. Pace sold the site to RailPen shortly after the Planning Inspector’s decision – again banking the uplift.
As I’ve mentioned before, if it wasn’t these firms doing this, it would be other firms doing it. The problem is the system that ministers brought in – the current one dating from the early 2010s as Eric Pickles and Grant Shapps sought to increase house building rates while at the same time slashing the budgets of local councils – one that led to local planning authorities being unable to resource their planning teams properly.
“There are significant resourcing challenges faced by local planning authorities which will be tasked with implementing many of the Government’s proposed reforms. We have previously investigated this issue, including how the reduction in local authority funding has slowed down the workings of the planning system in England”
Reforms to National Planning Policy – Commons Committee on Levelling Up, 14 July 2023, heading 5
For those of you not familiar with the planning system…
…I cannot think of an affordable and up to date guide for sale as a book – something made all the more harder with the continuing changes to the system. That said, the House of Commons Library published its own summary on 31 August 2023 here.
“Could a Community Power Act have saved it?”
Re my previous blogpost here? No. It only provides for the legal right to buy, not the resources to buy. In a land and property market that’s in the middle of a global bubble and with a brand like ‘Cambridge’ attached to it, it’s just not going to happen. A city with a globally-recognised name governed like a market town. That’s where we are in the 21st Century.
It remains to be seen what proposals, if any, Labour and the opposition parties bring forward in their manifestos for the general election that is due sometime in 2024.
But I won’t hold my breath.
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