Refreshed planning application for student accommodation says that the 2017 housing study for Cambridge City Council is now out of date
I wrote about Cambridge’s student accommodation issues back in August 2023, noting the chronic and collective failures to co-ordinate policies on higher education policy, housing, and local government.
Go back a quarter of a century or so and you find me living in student accommodation in my second year of university down in Brighton that was so awful that the the local council had it shut down as unfit for human habitation. There were a couple of us from Cambridge living there out in central Hove. It was an experience that shaped me as a person both in terms of the importance of getting housing policy right, and also developing a very healthy scepticism towards senior executives in higher education who, along with the governments of John Major and Tony Blair, enabled such accommodation crises to emerge in the first place.
It’s only in the years that followed did I begin to understand how this resulted in so many missed opportunities – including the opportunity to spend a year in the EU on the Erasmus scheme, because you can’t snatch those opportunities when you are in the midst of a housing crisis (and a health crisis that inevitably goes with living in such accommodation) with an institution that simply did not care because it had followed Government incentives to expand their places at a far faster rate than university towns and cities could accommodate.
Which is my conclusion regarding national government policies in this blogpost
And for Cambridge?
They commissioned Cambridge University’s CCHPR to write a report which was published in 2017. PBSA in this case means “Purpose Built Student Accommodation”
Above – from the Assessment of Student Housing Demand and Supply for Cambridge City Council, CCHPR Jan 2017.
“So, progress update needed for how much student accommodation has been built since??”
We’re due a new a new plan for student accommodation.
“The analysis of the future potential for PBSA has a projection for 10 years to 2026.
Although the Local Plan period runs to 2031, there is a considerable lack of certainty
about potential future growth in the universities which means that 10 years is the
maximum projection that can be made using realistic data.”
The City Council’s Housing Delivery Annual Monitoring Report (See here for 2022-23 – we’re due another report for 2023-24 in March 2025, which should be in the next six weeks) states:
“There has been a net increase of 4,717 student rooms over the first twelve years of the plan period (2011-2023). The trigger of 3,104 rooms set by the indicator in the plan relates to the findings of the Assessment of Student Housing Demand and Supply study (January 2017) for Cambridge City Council and is the demand for a ten year period from 2016 to 2026. Since the 2016/2017 monitoring year an additional 2,204 (net) student rooms have been provided.“
Above – AMR 2022-23 para 3.27, p19
Which means for the reporting period of the CCHPR 2017 report that estimated an additional 6,000 units would be needed, Cambridge and South Cambs would need to complete a net 3,800 additional units between April 2023 and March 2026. It will be interesting to see how many new student rooms have been built across the previous financial year.
What one set of consultants say in a new student development that has planning permission
The developer’s website is still up here for the Newmarket Road development of around 150 units – mainly for Anglia Ruskin University students. The reason why I spotted it was because the developer wants to tweak the application to serve Cambridge University students as well, hence they paid consultants to provide an evidence base. That evidence base is a three page report you can see via the planning portal, typing the following into the simple search function: 25/00537/S106A
At the start it says:
“ROK Planning has been instructed by Stellar Cambridge Ltd to produce a bespoke analysis
of the student housing market in Cambridge in support of a planning application at 444
Newmarket Road, Cambridge, CB5 8JL”
“The Cambridge City Council Annual Monitoring Report (2017) highlights that the combined full time / part time undergraduate and postgraduate student population of the University of Cambridge and Anglia Ruskin University in the 2016/17 stood at a total of 30,712, up from a total of 29,320 students in the 2015/16 year.”
Above – Consultant’s report
Those numbers have risen further, to around 35,000 for the two universities in our city.
- The figure for Cambridge University for 2024/25 is 24,912
- The figure for ARU is around 10,000 as the official statistics don’t disaggregate by campus
So what seems to be happening is that the two universities seem to be expanding their student numbers faster than the city can provide purpose-built student accommodation for them.
(Consider this advance notice for the Greater Cambridge Shared Planning Service to commission a similar assessment that will be able to take account of the Government’s growth plans.)
The two big problems councils face as I mentioned in my 2023 blogpost are that local councils:
- Do not have the legal powers to restrict the growth of educational establishments
- Do not have the financial powers to ensure that their own local residential housing needs are met – ones that are essential for the proper functioning of towns and cities.
“Do we know what the Universities’ growth plans are? And for the various private institutions too?”
No – and that is a huge problem.
I’ve been trying to find out what Anglia Ruskin University’s growth plans are for the future – and how their strategy for student accommodation is incorporated into this, but I cannot find anything of substance in their corporate documents here. Fortunately, several of those corporate documents come to their end of their lifespans in 2026, so now is a very good time to start working on the next ones given the new government’s policies.
**Hello chaps! You owe town an Olympic-size swimming pool!**
I haven’t forgotten – recalling the NW Cambridge Forum of Oct 2024 here, and also my blogpost the following month here
Interestingly the web pages of the property development section of the University of Cambridge’s Estates Division has a lovely photograph of the University Sports Centre in West Cambridge – and it’s on one of those two big green patches that the swimming pool is meant to go – as per the University’s previous planning and vision documents.
Above – Cambridge University Estates – Property Development
Not surprisingly, the big names in the property professions are calling for more student accommodation to be built. Such as Savills:
“Ensuring cities have an adequate supply of suitable housing is key to balancing the needs of students and local communities. Many universities have recognised the need for more student housing to address the supply shortages and to mitigate against loss of housing in the private rented sector. The next and perhaps even bigger challenge for universities is to secure both new supply and new private sector investment to upgrade their existing residences to meet Government energy efficiency targets.”
Corranne Wheeler, 08 April 2024 for Savills
“How long can the bubble keep growing before it bursts?”
History tells us that such bubbles have a habit or bursting, and that we risk being left with a lot of stranded assets that are difficult to convert into other uses.
The failure of municipal and strategic planning systems in England
Part of the problem is that there’s no proper system to balance out the competing demands from ‘the market’ vs ‘society’ – especially one based within the constraints of the ecosystems that we live in. As Sam Davies alluded to here, there isn’t an infinite amount of land, and people can only build so tall before diminishing returns and technological limits of materials start kicking in, restricting the heights and numbers of units that can be crammed in.
Part of that failure is both political and institutional. The idea that wealthy interests can set out their demands like this irrespective of who gets elected speaks volumes about the strength and vitality of our democracy and political institutions and systems.
Not everything needs to be in Cambridge
Despite the cliche’d photographs of the college money shots that various commercial outfits use to sell whatever it is that they are selling, the reality is that most people in the city won’t be promenading on college lawns on a sunny day in June. Instead they are more likely to be in an overpriced, cramped, poorly-constructed newbuild property of the like that Cambridge MP Daniel Zeichner tore into in a speech to Parliament back in 2021. Part of the responsibility of the Minister for Housing and Planning and through him, The Chancellor, is to have a system that requires remedial repairs to be carried out swiftly, and at the expense of the people and firms responsible. And if the existing systems and structures underpinned by company law enable such firms and individuals to get away with it – as too many have done in the cladding scandal, then it’s up to ministers to propose new policies and table new legislation – even if it means changing the system, in order to stop the slums of the future from being built in the first place.
“Cramming everything into Cambridge – are there alternatives?”
Yes – from investing in the north of England, through to having designated ‘landing pads’ for Cambridge start-ups that then become too big for Cambridge. I wrote about the idea of underpinning such a policy with next generation rail connecting Cambridge to the historic county towns of Bedford and Northampton, noting both have declining industries and sectors alongside their historic riversides that could be regenerated for the benefit of both towns. Also, given that Northampton had its fledgling university crushed at the hands of Oxford – to Cambridge’s benefit, I think both ancient universities and their colleges have something to make up for on that front!
Public policy – easier said than done
This is why independent post-occupancy evaluations are ever so important. Furthermore, if the data on inspections eg on whether newbuild homes still met the energy performance standards that they were designed to, were made public and disaggregated by firms and companies involved, can you imagine the impact that this would have? In fact, we already have some idea because the EU did it with car makers in the 1980s.
“Consumer information based on crash tests started in Europe in the late 1980s with German motoring organisation and magazine publication of results of frontal crash tests. In the early 1990s in the UK, the WHICH? Magazine published the results of the Secondary Safety Rating System in Cars – a mix of visual inspection and component testing“
Vehicle Safety by the European Commission
When the results were released, those cars shown to be the least safe took hits to their sales. Creating an incentive to…and the rest is history.
Food for thought?
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Below – if we’re talking about housing and public services to go with them, some examples from the Great Shelford-based Independence Educational Publications aimed at discussion groups for young people/teenagers.
The Cambridge Town Owl 