Work halts on East Cambridgeshire Local Plan - as it would be a ‘waste of public funds’

Work on a new Local Plan to guide future development across East Cambridgeshire has been pulled, just months after councillors agreed to start it.

Cllr Anna Bailey, the Conservative leader of East Cambridgeshire District Council, said it would be a “waste of public funds” to work on it when the authority is likely to be “abolished” under local government reform plans.

The government’s devolution plans are set to scrap the two-tier system of district and county councils in Cambridgeshire and replace them with a unitary council or councils, providing all services. Council leaders are due to submit their initial proposals by 21 March.

Councillors agreed in October to work on a new Local Plan to guide development in East Cambridgeshire as the current one was signed off in 2015 and amended in 2023.

But Cllr Bailey told a meeting on 25 February: “The Labour government has decided to abolish the district council, rather shockingly, and we are going to be subsumed into a new unitary authority, the geography of which is obviously still to be decided, but will clearly be very different to that that we have now.

“Alongside local government reform there are also plans in the devolution White Paper for spatial planning powers to be given to the directly-elected mayor of Cambridgeshire and Peterborough.

“Clearly it would be wrong to spend hundreds of thousands of pounds of taxpayers’ funds doing work on the wrong geography that can’t be utilised in a future Local Plan that will serve a very different area, so it would just be a waste of public funds.

“This is not where any of us wanted to be I don’t think, but it is the right decision given all of the circumstances.”

Cllr Bailey said the district has a five-year land supply for housing, and that many areas in the district have neighbourhood plans setting out some guidance for new developments.

Cllr Lorna Dupré, leader of the Liberal Democrat and Independent group, “reluctantly” agreed.

She said: “It is clear that much has changed since the decision just four months ago to start work on an updated Local Plan. Given those changes, not least the government’s proposals for local government reorganisation and for new powers to elected mayors, which are throwing everything up in the air, we agree that the time is now not right to progress with revising the Local Plan.”

However, Cllr Dupré highlighted that a “previous rewrite was pulled” several years ago, and argued subsequent calls from the opposition for work to start on a new Local Plan could have meant a new plan was “almost complete by this stage”.

Cllr Bailey said there a number of “massive factors” led to the withdrawal of the previous plan, including a planning inspector putting a “red pen” through the “entire community-led development policy”.