There are only days left to complete this consultation:

• The establishment of a Greater Cambridge Development Corporation – it closes on Wednesday, 1st April.
• NB The local government reorganisation consultation closed on Thursday, 26th March.

Greater Cambridge Development Corporation

Here’s another important consultation – the establishment of a Greater Cambridge Development Corporation – to usher in a centrally-led urban development corporation (UDC).

Its function will be to combine Cambridge city and South Cambs as an UDC.

Should we be fearful of the term ‘urban’?

The government sees Cambridge as ripe for expansion, saying: ‘Cambridge is a major contributor to the UK economy, contributing an estimated £30 bn annually to UK Gross Value Added’. (The GVA for the whole of the UK is £2.04 tn*.)

Gross Value Added (GVA) is the value of the goods and services produced minus the value of the intermediate inputs that were used to produce those goods and services. [https://whatworksgrowth.org/insights/understanding-gva].

London Economics, a specialist economics and policy consultancy, produced a report** on the economic and social impact of University of Cambridge, putting the GVA at a much lower figure – £13.358 bn (in 2020-21).

It confirmed the government’s £30 bn, but classified it is as the aggregate economic impact of the University of Cambridge, which is an entirely different thing.

Whatever, the fear must surely be the UDC will railroad through projects to make Cambridge richer at the expense of making South Cambs poorer – poorer by turning land which should be used for food security into housing estates and by turning villages into dormitory towns (even if there is a pretence of calling them villages) where everyone is expected to commute into Cambridge.

To help, an objective is to ‘introduce transformative transport solutions that minimise journey times, reduce congestion, and enable seamless movement across Greater Cambridge’ while also ‘deliver[ing] environmentally sustainable and climate resilient outcomes’.

NB  At an Extraordinary Meeting of South Cambs District Council on 27th March, its councillors ‘voiced their strong opposition to government proposals for a Greater Cambridge Urban Development Corporation’. This SCDC press release explains.

The consultation closes on 1st April.

BACKGROUND
https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/establishing-a-development-corporation-in-greater-cambridge.

SURVEY
https://consult.communities.gov.uk/cambridge-strategy-unit/greater-cambridge-development-corporation.

* From the UK’s Office for National Statistics’ Blue Book via a table in this Wikipedia entry – scroll down to ‘Sectors’; £2.04 trillion is the total of the second column in the table headed ‘Contributions to the UK economy by sector’.

** Link to the London Economics’ report: https://www.cam.ac.uk/system/files/le_-_economic_and_social_impact_of_university_of_cambridge_-_final_report.pdf.

_{Post created by Peter Mann (with no AI assistance), 12th March; updated 27th March 2026.}