Greater Cambridge Development Corporation (Establishment) Order 2026

Lord Lansley Excerpts

Wednesday 22nd July 2026 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Lansley]

At end to insert “but that this House regrets that the geographic scope of the Development Corporation proposed in the Order is not extended to correspond to the functional economic geography of the Cambridge-based economy; and that this Order is not accompanied by an Order setting out planning powers for the Development Corporation focused on very large new sites for development.”

[Lord Lansley (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for introducing the order and setting out so clearly what the Government are seeking to achieve. I have tabled a regret amendment, not because I oppose the establishment of the Greater Cambridge Development Corporation but because I think what is in the order and in the Government’s plans both is insufficiently ambitious in terms of the geography and what needs to be achieved and overreaches in what the Government are seeking to do for planning and plan-making powers in Cambridge itself.

I should declare an interest. Of course, for 18 years I was Member of Parliament for South Cambridgeshire, the area that the development corporation will cover, and for the last decade I have been chair of the Cambridgeshire Development Forum. I have had only the most positive continuing engagement through that role with local planning authorities and the Cambridge Growth Company. I agree entirely with the Minister that we will very much miss the noble Lord, Lord Vallance, in his role as the Minister for the OxCam growth corridor, and I hope that the Government will continue to follow through on the excellent work that he implemented.

Why do I say that the Government are insufficiently ambitious? When we look 25 years ahead, we are looking for a development corporation to add value to what is already being done in Cambridge. We are already building. The university has helped to build Eddington. We have built out at Trumpington Meadows. We allocated green-belt land and are building out at the Cambridge Biomedical Campus. It is the Government who prevented us from proceeding as we wanted to in Cambridge North because they would not pay for wastewater treatment and removal. We have just had Homes England, Hill Residential, the local authority and the Cambridge Growth Company coming together to set out plans for the redevelopment of Cambridge City Airport as the Cambridge East development, with East West Rail coming through. There is no shortage of impetus from the planning authorities. Indeed, last year, Greater Cambridge Shared Planning, a shared service between Cambridge City Council and South Cambridgeshire District Council, was the planning authority of the year.

We need to look at this development corporation and ask: how does it add value? The Minister was absolutely right: it is by building out the infrastructure. I will give just one example: the mass rapid transit requirements around Cambridge. Cambridge Ahead has said recently, on where the Cambridge cluster really extends to, that in the years ahead we are looking at what is, in effect, a polycentric system of Cambridge and related large settlements which will form part of a functional economic geography. If you look at a map, a 20-mile radius around Cambridge includes Ely, Newmarket, Haverhill, Royston, St Neots and Huntingdon.

Huntingdon is an excellent example. We need mass rapid transit to Huntingdon, in addition to the A14 and the Cambridgeshire Guided Busway. We have the space to do it. Huntingdon’s local plan process is currently looking at some 24,000 additional homes in the plan period and beyond, in places such as Alconbury Weald and Wyton. If the Greater Cambridge Development Corporation is going to deliver that infrastructure, it has the powers to do that beyond its territory, as the Minister said. But, if it wanted to take responsibility for major settlements such as Alconbury Weald or Wyton or, heading to the east, somewhere such as Westley Green, it is technically beyond the boundary that we are looking at. If the Minister wanted to add value to the local planning process, she might like to have a look at East Cambridgeshire District Council, which is not proceeding with any local plan process, unlike Cambridge City Council and South Cambridgeshire District Council, which are in the midst of creating a very ambitious local plan and expect to conclude it by the end of 2027.

What I ask the Minister to do is to think very hard about this regret amendment and accept that the development corporation should not be confined to the geography that is set out here. It should, in time, potentially be responsible for other major settlements. Within Cambridge city and South Cambridgeshire, it should not take general planning powers and, specifically, should not take the plan-making powers after the point at which the current local plan is adopted. That would be an outrageous abuse of the democratic process and would vitiate all the partnership working being done in Cambridge city and beyond in the Greater Cambridge area to try to deliver precisely the nationally significant growth that the Minister has been advocating.

We are talking here about the establishment order, but I think the Minister fully understands that what we are really talking about is that, when the subsequent planning functions order comes forward, that should be an opportunity for her to think again about the results of the consultation and to bring forward something focused on red-line sites for major, strategic settlements, and not taking responsibility for plan-making powers. I beg to move the regret amendment in my name.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Lansley (Con)]

My Lords, I am very grateful to all noble Lords who took part in this really interesting, albeit short, debate. We have to understand that this is the first of what will necessarily be further debates at some point later in the autumn in relation to the order setting out what the planning functions of the development corporation will be.

I thought what the Minister had to say about maintaining a review of the boundaries was a really helpful and important thing to say, but it has to be understood that there is no legal requirement that the development corporation’s boundaries should align with the administrative boundaries of local authorities. They can differ. Perhaps we ought to give ourselves the freedom to think that they should differ in this instance, because we do not know what the unitary council is going to look like, and it is not absolutely necessary that the development corporation aligns with the unitary council when it comes.

When the noble Lord, Lord Smith of Finsbury, explains how well Cambridge has succeeded, he is, in a sense, reinforcing the fact that the place I represented and the local authorities which I supported—South Cambridgeshire was a Conservative authority for years—worked together to enable the Cambridge Biomedical Campus to be established by releasing green belt. We worked together to allow Trumpington Meadows to happen, and Cambridge City Council worked with the university to enable Eddington to be built, which is an award-winning development to the west of Cambridge. These things happened at pace and are examples for the rest of the country. So, the point of the development corporation, which I think we all support, is to do more and to add value; it is not to take over the responsibilities and the powers of the local authorities in so far as they are delivering.

I think we can agree that, if a local plan did not meet the need, you would have to step in. But I do not think there is any evidence that the Greater Cambridge local plan does not meet the need. There is plenty of evidence that East Cambridgeshire is not undertaking a local plan process at all, and the development corporation is not planning to step in there. Some parts of East Cambridge abut Cambridge city, and they are some of the principal areas for potential development in the future.

I will finish on this point. When the Minister looks at boundaries, and particularly when she and her colleagues look at planning functions, if they look at the possibility of having development management powers for major sites—I do not mean 250 homes; I mean the really big sites where the development corporation can add value to what is happening already—then fine, go for those sites, but just put a red line around them. You do not have to define strategic sites in the legislation. You can just put a red line around where those strategic sites are. As they come forward, maybe outside the area—in Huntingdon, or even, I say to my noble friend, at Tempsford—you could put a red line around those, make them part of the development corporation and give them the development management powers in that place. One does not need to take plan-making powers for the whole of a local authority area. That would be a step too far. We have enabled this debate this afternoon to put down that marker to the noble Baroness and to the Government, so they can think about that before we return to this in the autumn. With all those points made, I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.

Amendment to the Motion withdrawn.