FAQs

The Cambridge Growth Company (CGC) was established by government in 2024 to address barriers to growth and help unlock Greater Cambridge's full potential.

A subsidiary of Homes England, the government's housing and regeneration agency, the CGC works to unlock and accelerate development and deliver the homes, jobs and infrastructure needed for long-term, sustainable growth.

Peter Freeman is the Chair of the Cambridge Growth Company. He has a track record in delivering large scale development and regeneration projects, as well as being the outgoing Chair of Homes England. He was appointed on 30 October 2024 by the Minister of State for Housing and Planning, Matthew Pennycook.

You can read more about Peter's appointment here: Appointment of Cambridge Growth Company Chair - GOV.UK

Greater Cambridge is one of the UK's greatest success stories. But success has also brought challenges. Housing affordability, transport congestion, water scarcity and environmental pressures risk holding back sustainable growth.

The Cambridge Growth Company has been established to address these issues and help the area realise its full potential.

Working alongside partners, we are advancing near-term priorities to accelerate and unblock key development opportunities already identified.

This includes:

• Working with Homes England, government departments, local partners and the Cambridge Water Scarcity Group, we have helped unlock planning applications for over 9,000 new homes and 528,000 sqm of commercial space.
• Coordinating investment and enabling infrastructure to accelerate progress on key stalled sites, including:
  • £3 million to support a new model of emergency care and preparatory work for a future acute hospital at the Cambridge Biomedical Campus.
  • £23 million in recoverable funding (via Homes England) for the relocation of Waterbeach Station.
  £7.2 million to advance the Cambridge South East Transport (CSET) project.

Alongside near-term delivery, the CGC has commissioned Buro Happold and Prior + Partners to develop the evidence base for a long-term strategy for housing, employment space and infrastructure across Greater Cambridge.

This will look beyond standard planning timeframes, setting out a vision for how Greater Cambridge can continue to grow sustainably, building on the priorities in the emerging Greater Cambridge Local Plan and the forthcoming Mayoral Spatial Development Strategy.

On 28 January 2025, the Chancellor unveiled new plans to deliver the Oxford-Cambridge Growth Corridor, which has the potential to boost the UK economy by up to £78 billion by 2035.

The Growth Company's work across Greater Cambridge is one component of the government's strategy to pursue growth across the Oxford to Cambridge Growth Corridor.

The Cambridge Growth Company is working with the government, including Lord Vallance in his role as the Oxford to Cambridge Growth Corridor Champion and Science minister, to coordinate the delivery of sustainable growth across the region.

The government announced £10 million at Autumn Budget 2024 to enable the Cambridge Growth Company to develop an ambitious plan for housing, transport, wider infrastructure, and for the water needed to support sustainable growth.

In October 2025, government announced a further £400 million commitment to support the work of CGC and a future delivery vehicle. Additional funding was announced in March 2026. 

Alongside this core funding, CGC is also working with partners to attract additional investment to unlock local projects and accelerate delivery across Greater Cambridge.

The Cambridge Growth Company is committed to ensuring local voices and priorities are reflected in our work.

Since our establishment, we have been engaging with a wide range of stakeholders, including community groups and local residents, with a strong focus on listening and understanding local perspectives. As our work develops and our team grows, there will be further opportunities for engagement.

Alongside this direct engagement, we set up an Advisory Council in February 2025 to help ensure that local perspectives are represented in our work. The Council includes local leaders who provide insight, challenge and guidance, helping to ensure that the views, priorities and ambitions of local residents inform CGC's decisions and activities. The list of local representatives who sit on the Council can be found here, and minutes of previous meetings found here.

The Greater Cambridge Development Corporation will be a new statutory delivery body so government needs to set out new legislation, known as statutory instruments. This will firstly, establish the Development Corporation through legislation laid on 4th June, and then to grant it planning powers, through a second statutory instrument which will be laid in the autumn.

On establishment, the Development Corporation will be able to set itself up as a functioning delivering body, with automatically conferred powers including land assembly and investment powers, and robust and transparent governance in place.

When the planning powers are granted to the Development Corporation, anticipated to be in 2027, it will exercise development management powers for strategic development immediately. However, it is intended that a phased approach will be taken to granting the Development Corporation plan-making powers, as this is the fastest route for an up-to-date local plan to be adopted in Greater Cambridge and to accelerate growth. The Secretary of State would ultimately decide when the restriction on the Development Corporation’s ability to exercise its plan-making powers should be lifted. However, we anticipate that to be once the draft local plan has been adopted, subject to the public examination.

The Development Corporation will be there to help deliver nationally significant growth. Taking an infrastructure first approach, it will focus on major strategic development sites, which are often difficult to deliver, involve working with multiple partners and come with significant infrastructure requirements.

The government acknowledges suggestions from respondents that thresholds should be set either on the upper end or higher than the consulted range. Thresholds for non-residential development have therefore been set above the consulted range, at a minimum of 5,000 sqm, and simplified by removing references to use classes.

For housing, the government recognises that most large and strategic developments will involve more than 1,000 homes. However, a lower threshold of 250 homes will be used. This is because the Development Corporation can choose to pass applications on smaller or non-strategic schemes to the Greater Cambridge Shared Planning Service, but the Shared Planning Service cannot pass decisions to the Development Corporation. Setting a lower threshold ensures that the Development Corporation can take decisions on strategic sites where needed, while allowing non-strategic schemes to continue to be determined by GCSP. In practice, most developments between 250 and 1,000 homes are expected to be decided by the Greater Cambridge Shared Planning Service.

Many respondents pointed out that size alone does not always define what counts as a strategic site. The government agrees and plans to publish a clearer definition of “sites of strategic importance” at a later date, with the minimum thresholds providing a backstop.

The government will introduce legislation in the autumn to grant planning functions to the Development Corporation. These will confirm when it takes on development management decision making responsibilities, which is not expected to happen before 2027.

Overall, the intention is to clearly define what counts as a strategic site. This should reinforce the expectation that the Development Corporation will remain focused on the delivery of strategic scale development.

All developers should continue to liaise with the Greater Cambridge Shared Planning Service as they do today.

We recognise the importance of having well‑defined working arrangements with the Greater Cambridge Shared Planning Service and are discussing how we can best work together. We are committed to reaching a formal agreement with GCSP once the Development Corporation is established. This will set out efficient development management administrative processes, alongside arrangements for processing and delegating decisions and specialist advice available within the Greater Cambridge Shared Planning Service, to inform decisions or applications for strategic scale applications. The Development Corporation will work with GCSP to notify applicants and developers when the Development Corporation’s development management powers will commence.

In its determination of applications, the Development Corporation will not support poor quality, badly located or badly designed developments. The government expects the Development Corporation to be an exemplar in sustainable, high-quality development and place making.

The emerging Greater Cambridge Local Plan is an ambitious document and the Development Corporation will support the progression of the local plan, helping to accelerate delivery of the plan. Greater Cambridge has the potential to make an even greater contribution to the UK economy, an ambition shared by many partners. Successor plans will build positively on the foundations set out in the emerging local plan.

The Development Corporation is there to help deliver infrastructure-led growth. As part of its evidence gathering and planning work, the Development Corporation will assess the most sustainable locations for growth. Any planning decisions taken by the Development Corporation will need to have regard to the relevant development plan and national planning policy, including policies relating to Green Belt protection, in the same way that the Greater Cambridge Shared Planning Service does.

The Development Corporation is intended as a joint national and local endeavour, combining local insight and input from locally democratically elected representatives with national leadership, powers and investment.

The government recognises that resident voices from across Greater Cambridge will form an integral part of the joint local and national endeavour in shaping the area’s future. The imperative to unlock infrastructure and delivery constraints must be rooted in an inclusive and sustainable approach, which has the needs of local communities embedded in its design and objectives.

The government will work with the Development Corporation to introduce additional mechanisms to strengthen local participation and representation. Specifically, the government will ask the Development Corporation to create structured forums for engagement which reflect the diversity of places and lived experiences across the region, and serve as an exemplar of innovative, transparent, continuous and deep engagement. This approach will provide a clear structure for enabling residents to help shape priorities, inform proposals, and ensure that a wide range of voices are heard as plans are developed transparently.

This commitment is included as additional objective for the Development Corporation:

Local representation, participation and transparency

Ensure that community representation is embedded in the work of the Development Corporation. Make engagement accessible, transparent, and involve communities and local organisations at formative stages from making decisions to developing plans.

The government recognises the strength of views expressed on the proposed governance and the importance of local representation on the Development Corporation Board.

The Development Corporation Board: The Development Corporation will be formally accountable to the Secretary of State, reflecting the ambition to deliver nationally significant growth. To ensure local leadership continues to have a substantive and influential role, the government is committed to maintaining four Board positions for democratically elected local representatives. The proportion of voting rights will be set out by the Board’s Terms of Reference. It is anticipated that the Development Corporation would regularly hold Board meetings that are open to the public.

A Development Corporation Planning Committee: It is also anticipated that a planning committee of the Development Corporation would comprise technical experts in planning, urban design and infrastructure delivery, as well as local representation, ensuring meaningful and early engagement on key planning decisions that will shape the future development of Greater Cambridge. As set out in the consultation, transparency and openness are essential to ensuring that the Development Corporation will be accountable to local residents and to the wider public. As it enters delivery, the Development Corporation will hold its planning committee meetings in public, following the same practice as local councils. In doing so, the government expects it to adopt the principles set out in the Openness of Local Government Bodies Regulations 2014, enabling members of the public to report on meetings of their council using digital and social media.

Community involvement and engagement: The government will ask the Development Corporation to create exemplar engagement structures which would enable broader community participation, including from residents, community representatives, and Town and Parish Councils.

CGC was set up as an interim delivery vehicle for Greater Cambridge - as a subsidiary of Homes England - and was tasked with laying the foundations for long-term delivery. Subject to parliamentary process, the development corporation will be a new statutory body. The CGC team, and incoming Chief Executive, is responsible for the transition. Further details will be available once the Dev Co is legally established and the appropriate governance is in place.