University: Cambridge growth plan can help economy ‘take off’

A Westminster government plan to expand the city of Cambridge has been backed as potentially helping its innovation economy keep up with US competitors, while bringing caution that development cannot be to the detriment of current residents.

In an announcement of plans to focus UK housebuilding in city areas where demand is high, the government centred attention on what it termed “a new urban quarter in Cambridge which will unlock the city’s full potential as a source of innovation and talent”, with the city to be first destination for a “super squad” of planners overcoming barriers to development.

As the highly successful Cambridge innovation economy grows around the university, the government aims to address the block on further success presented by Cambridge’s property shortage and high prices. But its moves highlight the tensions around fast growth in a place long regarded as a historic university city, without heavy industry, now becoming a powerful motor in the UK economy.

“If these plans are developed with backing from local communities and with a broad range of support from across the political spectrum, then the exponential potential of Cambridge’s combination of technology transfer, venture capital, government support and infrastructure funding can really take off,” Andy Neely, senior pro vice-chancellor (enterprise and business relations) at the University of Cambridge, told Times Higher Education.

He flagged that “current constraints on infrastructure and housing” meant that nearly half of the university’s employees “must travel on congested roads and transport into Cambridge from the surrounding area to work in the city”. Meanwhile, the 66-hectare West Cambridge science site was “only partially developed, delayed by water supply issues that can only be addressed through collaborative and creative solutions”.

“A plan for growth can explicitly address and overcome these challenges,” Professor Neely said.

“The [government] announcement was met with some understandable local criticism. We are clear that development must happen for the benefit of everybody who lives in the city and surrounding areas and not at the expense or to the detriment of current residents.”

Samuel Hughes, head of housing at the Centre for Policy Studies, who argued in a previous report for the thinktank that the government should back “an urban extension to Cambridge”, said that at present the success of Cambridge, “one of the country’s great national assets, a leader in life sciences and technology, generating spinout companies of enormous importance in the medium term to the country’s economy”, was “threatened by the fact Cambridge just doesn’t produce enough lab space”, lagging far behind US rivals such as Boston on that score.

If that continues, that will mean Cambridge falling further behind “the great American centres, it will provincialise Oxford and Cambridge and they will lose their current position as being world-leading in a range of key industries of our time”, Dr Hughes said.

Stian Westlake, a former adviser to Conservative science ministers, was co-author on a 2020 paper arguing that the UK government should “throw its weight behind a major expansion of either Oxford or Cambridge, our two most research-intensive towns, where despite decades of wrangling, it is still hard to build significant amounts of new housing”.

Mr Westlake, now executive chair of the Economic and Social Research Council, said that the recent announcement confirmed that the government saw Cambridge’s innovation economy as “a big bet” for UK growth.

john.morgan@timeshighereducation.com