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South Cambs District Council South Cambridgeshire Hall Cambourne Business Park Cambourne CB23 6EA th 13 February 2013
Histon and Impington should be a place where: A high proportion of people walk, or cycle, to shops and facilities and feel it is safe to do so. There is a strong community built around existing schools. Existing services are extended and improved and new services are developed where most needed. There is access to the countryside. The distinctive village character is retained.
Histon and Impington are pleasant places to live because they are still villages they are not built up like towns and there is a sense of community. Building more homes, particularly on green belt land which should be preserved as such, will not only have a detrimental effect on the environment but also on our quality of life. Histon and Impington resident 1.3 Public Meeting A public meeting was organised by the Action Group and attended by nearly 60 people on 4th February. The people attending were unanimously not in favour of building in the Green Belt and gave evidence to support the view that the current infrastructure could not cope with a large increase in population. Many residents are not antidevelopment as such but do not believe that Green Belt should be built on when there are many Brownfield sties available across the area.
What are the Councils targets to re-use previously developed land? Does the council use a Brownfield first approach? What is the Brownfield target that the Council set for the proportion of new housing to be built on Brownfield sites? The Vision Park in Histon has many unoccupied premises could the buildings/land be used creatively?
4.0 Infrastructure
Cursory references to the infrastructure in the SHLAAs do not reflect the true picture of Histon and Impingtons current infrastructure capacity. Additionally the Infrastructure Delivery Study commissioned by Cambridge City and South Cambridgeshire District Council in August 2012 is flawed. We do not see any evidence for objectively assessed, accurate infrastructure requirements based on different building scenarios. The Local Development Framework Core Strategy Development Plan document (2007) states as a strategy objective To provide and enable provision of enhanced infrastructure to meet the needs of the expanded population. and states in the policy for Rural Centres that Development and redevelopment without any limit on individual scheme size will be permitted within the village frameworks of Rural Centres, as defined on the Proposals Map, provided that adequate services, facilities and infrastructure are available or can be made available as a result of the development. How are these issues to be resolved when what is needed, for example a medical centre, cannot be funded by developer contributions alone and additional funding does not appear to have been identified. 4.1 Health services The GP surgery has 40% less capacity than it should have for this population. Evidence from local people highlights that they are sometimes experiencing long waiting times for appointments and often very long waiting times to see a doctor of their choice. A village of this size would normally be expected to be served by a medical centre. 4.2 Schools Some families did not get a place for their child at the infants school this year and are having to travel out of the village or in one case, chose to leave the village. If, for example, 100 dwellings are built, resulting in a need for 2535 primary places (as per County Council pupil product ratio per 100 dwellings) how will those children be accommodated within the village schools where the infants school in particular is full? If, for example, 500 houses are built, requiring considerable expansion of facilities, (assuming this cannot possibly generate enough income for a new school) it is unlikely that existing facilities could be extended to accommodate an increased child population of this size. The NPPF says that The government attaches great importance to ensuring that a sufficient choice of school places is available to meet the needs of existing and new communities. Unless serious consideration is given to these issues future development in Histon and Impington, in our opinion, is not sustainable. Children attending school outside of the local area and having to travel is completely undesirable and unacceptable. We would hope that the Council will give serious consideration to these issues ahead of any planned development. People need houses, the villages should share in provision and not be nimbys but infrastructure needed schools (all ages) and health services not coping now. The infant school was oversubscribed this year & new homes tend to attract young families so the situation will only worsen and the infant school has no expansion capacity. If another school was built with the 400 home proposal it would divide the village up. 1st routine appointment at GP today (21/1) is on 5/2. Histon and Impington Residents 4.3 Flood Risk and Sewerage Issues The concerns about flood risk are expressed in Issues and Options 1. New information is that both sites (Buxhall and Impington) have had standing water for months. 4.3.1 Buxhall Farm site Its particularly concerning that at Buxhall Farm there is an extensive area of standing water and the water table is so high that it is at or just below ground level for much of the year, producing a huge area of surface water with
attendant groundwater flooding. Sewerage issues concern residents. Residents living in the area of Buxhall have varying degrees of problems with sewerage throughout the year. The Buxhall Farm site is productive land. It is also prone to 'groundwater flooding' . The farm land is a totally unsuitable site for domestic dwellings as it regularly floods and with increased rainfall in years to come the flooding will only get worse. Groundwater flooding is a notoriously difficult and expensive problem to solve and solutions are often only temporary at best.
5.0 Employment
It is regrettable that there is no mention of increasing employment opportunities or the provision of land for employment purposes in the proposals presented in Options 1. The NPPF states that to promote a strong rural economy, local and neighbourhood plans should: support the sustainable growth and expansion of business in all types of rural areas, both through the conversion of existing buildings and well designed new buildings. There is no evidence of this other than that proposed by our Parish Council. Without the provision of employment opportunities as part of proposed population growth, people will need to travel to Cambridge and its environs. Without adequate public transport infrastructure, this will probably be by car. We would like to see new employment premises incorporated into any development proposals and would want to work with the Council to identify any potential opportunities. The Local Plan should include opportunities for employment in our locality.
8.0 NIAB3
This is the only remaining piece of open land separating Cambridge City and Impington. The feedback from local people highlighted that residents feel strongly that they did not want the village to lose its rural identity or to be seen as an extension of Cambridge. Visually the land signifies a change from urban to village environment and plays an important role in separating the village from what is soon to be (NIAB1&2) a huge built up area. The other concern raised about NIAB3 is that if the community stadium was sited here, people who wanted to access it from north of the county would invariably travel through Histon and Impington on the B1049 adding to the existing traffic issues. What we need to develop in Histon and Impington is our village character. Vital to this is to reverse the spread of Cambridge that threatens to subsume us.
6m) is necessary for this to be achievable together with kerb radii larger than can be accommodated without purchasing land from properties on either side of the proposed access. It is highly likely that the kerb radius that can be accommodated within the land available would be inadequate. The visibility at this site is impaired by hedging and fencing of properties either side of the proposed access. Given that traffic speeds are often higher than 30mph (police traffic report Sept 2008 showed significant amount of vehicles travelling at speeds higher than 30mph and no evidence to suggest this is now not the case despite speed bumps in place) it is reasonable to expect that visibility splays of 2.4m x 70m would be required. This cannot be achieved without the removal of hedges and fencing on neighbouring properties. Given the frequency of buses on Impington Lane and the fact that it carries frequent other traffic and is a busy access to the Village College as well as a through route to Milton and the Household Recycling Centre we would highlight that it is already of sub-standard width for the nature and volume of traffic which it carries and should not be subjected to an increase in traffic. Possible increases in traffic as a result of other proposed developments should also be taken into account.
10.0 Consultation
It says in the Councils LDF Statement of Community Involvement the council is committed to the principle of Encouraging real participation in local democracy by people who may normally feel excluded from decisionmaking processes. It says that the council is aware that in the past certain groups have been under represented and seeks to redress this. It includes children, young people and older people in the list of groups which may have been under represented previously. We have seen no evidence that consultation with those groups has happened in our local area. We know from some of our survey responses that many older people feel excluded from the process, they may not have a computer or it may be difficult for them to attend the planning exhibition held locally. We want to ask what the council did to actively engage in consulting these groups of people on local planning issues. In our opinion the consultation process is flawed. It does not actively engage people in discussion about what their vision is for the community. It presents pre-defined options and asks people if they object or support. That, in our view, is not conducive with empowering local people to shape their surroundings (NPPF p5) nor does it demonstrate a Creative exercise in finding ways to enhance and improve the places in which people live their lives (NPPF p5) We discovered that very few people were aware of the Issues and Options consultations. The council may believe that they had a good response but the achievement of having the number of responses they did is the result of a few local people putting hundreds of letters through letterboxes with the intention of making sure that the community in Histon and Impington was informed. The process is not accessible to a large section of the community. The website for Issues and Options 2 is really complicated and it is very difficult to find the right place to comment on particular proposals. To date (12/2/13) the following number of people have entered representations onto the SCDC Issues and Options 2 online forms: Station site PC1 (9), Former Bishops Hardware Store H2 (1), By-pass farm R1 (2) and NIAB 3 GB6 (9)
We would welcome the opportunity to present at any planning meeting where decisions about sites in Histon and Impington are being made.
Yours sincerely Sue Lee On behalf of Histon and Impington Village Action Group