I am very against the proposal to release land from the Green Belt adjoining Babraham Road and north of Granham's Road. The current development of Ninewells, only recently finished, emphasised a soft, green edge to the city. What was the point of this if new development is then added on? If the idea all along was to allow this field to be developed then it should have been done at the same time as the Ninewells development, so that all the space could be developed in an integrated manner, rather than just piecemeal. Another development, GB1 and GB2, on the other side of Babraham Road, has already been approved, which means already 430 more homes are going to be built in the next couple of years. Combined with the 270 homes in Ninewells, that means already 700 extra homes along Babraham Road. The road is already solid with cars coming into Cambridge every weekday morning after 7:45am, and solid with cars leaving Cambridge after about 3:30pm. An extra 430 homes will make it worse. The proposed expansion of the biomedical campus to Babraham Road will make it MUCH worse.

The land is grade 2 agricultural land which should protected in line with the government's national planning policy framework. It supports a great deal of wildlife including grey partridges seen just today. A lot of people walk around it and cycle past it. It leads to the important Gog hills and White Hill and the Nine Wells nature reserve. The land acts as a buffer between Granham's Road and the southern edge of the city. If the land is built upon then the edge of the city will be Granham's Road - a hard edge which is against the vision of Cambridge as a “compact, dynamic city located within the high quality landscape setting of the Cambridge Green Belt” (Cambridge 2018 Local Plan). Rather than proposing building, this area should be proudly incorporated into safeguarded area to link the Nine Wells nature reserve with the hills south of the city, and protected as part of the landscape setting of the city.

Previous plans had considered this Green Belt land but had rejected its use because of the risk of flooding. In January this year, when we had particularly heavy rains, there was a lake covering a large part of the field, corresponding very clearly with the flood risks (level 3) identified in the 2018 Local Plan. I would be happy to supply photos. I’m at a loss to understand how the flooding risk has reduced since 2018. It is an extremely serious problem and the Ninewells development has had the playground underwater and unusable by my daughters for most of the past winters.

The proposals talk about the importance of the Cambridge Biomedical Campus, and it is indeed a great asset to the city and the country, but there is currently plenty of space around the current buildings. I don’t understand how the Abcam building was allowed to have more space for the car park than for the building, since the traffic around Addenbrookes is already very heavy. Surely the existing and proposed extensions to the Park and Ride facilities along Babraham Road and further south, plus the Trumpington site, should have been leveraged rather than encouraging more car journeys by employees on the Campus? Another puzzle to me is why the air ambulance doesn’t go straight to a dedicated helipad on the roof of the hospital which would surely be quicker for patients than having to ride the last few hundred metres in an ambulance. This would free up a large area east of the new Abcam building. It seems to me poor justification to erode the Green Belt in order to satisfy the expansion of a Campus half a mile away that is currently much lower density than its potential. A Campus that sprawls across a mile of land will be less successful than one which achieves a critical density. No approval for development of this site should be given until the Campus has a clear plan for using the space it has already. This area shouldn't be speculatively included for Campus expansion in this version of the Local Plan.

Finally, there is one section that really grates. " • No development will be permitted south of Granham’s Road. However there may be potential to realign the eastern end of Granham’s Road to a point no further south than the southern boundary of the Wort’s Causeway development to the east of Babraham Road, subject to achieving an acceptable junction arrangement, with the Green Belt boundary following the line of the road. The additional area that may be created by realigning Granham’s Road is shown as a separate area at this stage, and will be explored further, with the boundary to be defined in the draft Local Plan.” This would be the junction of Granham’s Road that has just been modified, at great expense and disruption. The hedgerow that was cut down nearly two years ago still hasn’t been restored, and yet plans are already afoot to make this entire change redundant.