I am responding to the consultation on the local plan.

I do not accept the premise that there should be such large growth in the Greater Cambridge area. It is counter to the government’s ‘levelling up’ agenda in that it concentrates growth in an already largely affluent area and not in the less affluent north of England.

The Greater Cambridge area already has comparatively low unemployment and a relatively low number of unoccupied houses. Creating further employment in this area therefore means building more houses and creating the infrastructure that goes with them – for example roads, schools, doctors' surgeries, and this in turn results in damage to ecosystems, more carbon emissions, less land for food production, and greater risk of flooding.

The mitigations mentioned in the plans are unsatisfactory: expensive, and energy consuming, in the case of obtaining water from reservoirs, new or existing; deeply unconvincing in the idea that nature will benefit from the plans.

The plan is for the wrong thing in the wrong place. Areas of the north of England have more unoccupied land, more brown-field sites suitable for development and more people in search of employment.