In a report published yesterday (Thursday 26 February), City Deal partners will be asked to kick start a joint team charged with taking possible housing sites from theory to reality.
The joint council team will project manage all key housing development activities to get homes built more quickly, from finding, assessing and securing land to working with local communities, site design, gaining planning permission and handing over completed homes.
The team will bring together skills and housing knowledge from South Cambridgeshire and Cambridge City council’s housing teams and could see land owned by the County Council used for some development to deliver between 4,000 and 8,000 homes over the next 16 years.
South Cambridgeshire and Cambridge City councils already have ambitious council house building programmes with around 1,000 new homes expected to be completed over the next 30 years in South Cambridgeshire and at least 1,000 in Cambridge. As part of the Greater Cambridge City Deal all partners have committed to delivering an additional 1,000 affordable homes.
Leading councillors in both areas believe the number of affordable homes could be doubled if they are given more freedom from restrictive government rules on how the council’s can invest their own housing funds.
If the proposals for the new team are agreed, councillors have said that plans for building new council houses would see an ‘exciting step change’ in the speed of delivery.
Cambridge University has approved the principle of investing £30 million in affordable and key worker housing, which could be delivered more effectively using the proposed joint team.
The City Deal aims to secure hundreds of millions of pounds of additional funding for investment in transport infrastructure to support high quality economic and housing growth over the coming decades. £100m of Government funding will be made available in the five years from April 2015. If certain conditions are met, a further £200m may be secured from April 2020 onwards and up to a final £200m from April 2025 onwards.
The Greater Cambridge City Deal Partnership includes Cambridgeshire County Council, Cambridge City Council and South Cambridgeshire District Council as well as the Greater Cambridge Greater Peterborough Local Enterprise Partnership and Cambridge University. The partners are working closely together to bring forward projects that improve the economic success of the area.
The proposals will be presented to the Greater Cambridge City Deal Assembly on Friday 6 March before being discussed at the City Deal Executive Board meeting on Thursday 26 March. The Executive Board will be asked to agree forming the new joint team and initial funding to get it up and running.
Councillor Lewis Herbert, Chair of the Greater Cambridge City Deal Executive Board and Leader of Cambridge City Council, said: “We have a unique and incredibly exciting opportunity to become a housing developer with a difference. The difference being our aim first and foremost will be local people and delivering more affordable homes.
“Everyone knows how vital high quality new housing is in and around Cambridge to support our economic success and affordable homes are particularly vital to support those on low incomes who are struggling to get on the housing ladder or afford to rent at market rates.
“These plans would bring together all the parts of the jigsaw; People, land and finance. Other options would be to go out to the market to buy in services but this would cost more, take longer and would not give us the certainty doing it ourselves will do.”
To view the report being presented to the Assembly on Friday 6 March visit: http://scambs.moderngov.co.uk/ieListDocuments.aspx?MId=6539