The Alternatives

Almost everyone agrees Cambridge and the East of England need hundreds of thousands of new homes. The real debate is where they go and how. Here is an honest look at every option on the table, including ours.

Option 1: Build nothing new on greenfield land

The argument is that brownfield sites, empty homes and spare bedrooms can meet the need. We support brownfield-first, and every viable site should be used.

But Cambridge’s shortage is where the jobs are, and the region’s brownfield supply is nowhere near the scale of demand. Spare bedrooms belong to people, not to the planning system.

“Nothing on greenfield” doesn’t stop growth. It just prices a generation out, or pushes them into long commutes.

Option 2: Keep expanding existing towns and villages

This is what happens by default, and it’s what most local plans deliver. 400,000 homes built this way means roughly 2,000 estates of 200 homes, bolted onto the edge of hundreds of villages.

Each estate is too small to pay for a school, a surgery, a station or a reservoir. So each adds a little more traffic to the same roads, a little more sewage to the same treatment works, and a little more demand on the same GP. None of them ever triggers the infrastructure needed to cope.

That is urban sprawl: growth without a plan, spread across everyone’s back yard.

Option 3: Densify Cambridge

We support this too. But Cambridge is constrained by water supply, green belt, heritage and some of the highest land prices in the country.

Densification helps at the margins. It cannot deliver homes at the scale the region’s economy is creating jobs.

Option 4: Improve transport to existing towns

Better rail to the towns around Cambridge is a good idea. The problem is paying for it. New heavy rail costs hundreds of millions of pounds, and it only makes sense where enough people live near the stations to use it every day.

Villages and market towns spread thinly across the countryside don’t generate enough journeys to justify the line. The business case fails, and the line doesn’t get built. That is why so many rail links in the region stay on the wish list for decades.

Rail needs density: large numbers of people living and working within walking distance of stations. A new city provides exactly that. Forest City is designed around its railway from day one, putting a million people along a line that finally has the passengers to pay for itself. See the transport plan.

Option 5: Smaller new towns and urban extensions

Most new settlements in England are funded through Section 106 agreements. These are legal deals in which developers agree to pay for schools, surgeries, shops and roads as a condition of planning permission.

The catch is how they are structured. The developer’s money comes from selling homes, so obligations are tied to occupation triggers: a community centre once a set number of homes are occupied, a sports pavilion after a few hundred more. The result is built into the law: homes first, everything else later. If sales slow or costs rise, obligations can be delayed or renegotiated on viability grounds, and residents wait.

Northstowe, near Cambridge, shows what this looks like. It is planned for around 10,000 homes and 26,000 people, the biggest new town in England since Milton Keynes (source). The developer’s paperwork promised a community centre before the 900th home was occupied. Yet more than 1,200 homes were occupied with no shops or community facilities beyond three schools (source).

Six years after the first residents moved in, there was still no shop, café or GP surgery (source). In a county council survey, 76% of residents said they were fairly or very dissatisfied with local services (source).

A permanent community centre with a café and library opened in March 2026. A first convenience store was announced in August 2026 and is still fitting out. There is still no dedicated GP surgery: residents register in a neighbouring village, and a town hub with healthcare space is only now in planning.

That isn’t a failure of the people involved. It’s what the funding model produces. Residents wait years for the basics because the system can’t put infrastructure first.

Forest City works the other way round. Land is bought at agricultural value, and the rise in its value once the city is planned pays for the reservoir, the railway and the services up front, before the first homes are sold. That is the municipal model: the city keeps the land value it creates, and uses it to pay for infrastructure.

The problem nobody owns: cumulative impact

Every piecemeal option shares one flaw. Each application is judged on its own, so nobody is responsible for the total.

Campaigners have made this point for years, warning that local plans contain no cumulative assessment of the impact on biodiversity, food supply, flood risk, sewage spills and decades of construction disruption (source). They are right. The planning system has no mechanism to add it up.

A city is the only scale at which the total is assessed and paid for in one place:

• Water: one new reservoir, planned with Anglian Water, rather than thousands of new connections to a supply that’s already stretched. See the water plan.
• Sewage: one new treatment system designed for the city, not extra load on village works that already spill.
• Transport: heavy rail funded by the city’s land value and built before the homes, not bus promises that arrive decades late. See the transport plan.
• Nature: a single 12,000-acre nature reserve, including ancient woodland, SSSIs and watercourses, instead of fragmented offsets on the edge of estates. See the nature reserve.
• Farmland: one concentrated footprint, rather than hundreds of field-edge losses scattered across the region.
• Services: schools, hospitals and GPs planned for a million people from day one.

How the options compare

Every tick in the Forest City column is set out in the feasibility report.

Our tests, and an invitation

We think any serious plan for the region should meet five tests:

1. Infrastructure is funded and built before the homes.
2. Water supply is solved, not assumed.
3. Nature ends up with more land, not less.
4. Cumulative impacts are assessed as a whole.
5. It delivers homes at the scale of need.

If there’s a better plan that passes all five, we want to see it, and we’ll say so publicly.

Forest City is being tested through the government’s Spatial Development Strategy process: a transparent, evidence-led assessment run by the regional authorities themselves. We welcome any alternative being put through the same test.

Common questions

Why not just build on brownfield?

We support brownfield-first, and every viable site should be used. But Cambridge’s shortage is where the jobs are, and the region’s brownfield supply is nowhere near the scale of demand. Spare bedrooms belong to people, not to the planning system. Building nothing on greenfield does not stop growth — it prices a generation out, or pushes them into long commutes.

Why not expand existing towns?

That is what happens by default. 400,000 homes built this way means roughly 2,000 estates of 200 homes bolted onto the edge of hundreds of villages. Each estate is too small to pay for a school, a surgery, a station or a reservoir. That is urban sprawl: growth without a plan, spread across everyone’s back yard.

Why do new towns lack facilities?

Most are funded through Section 106 agreements tied to occupation triggers: homes first, everything else later. Northstowe shows the result — years of homes without shops, a café or a dedicated GP. Forest City buys land at agricultural value and uses the rise in that value to pay for the reservoir, railway and services up front. Read how the city pays for itself.