Cambridge Water Failures Pose Threat To Environment And Water Supply

The annual reviews by Ofwat, the Environment Agency and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) of the performance of England’s water companies were published on 21 October ¹. Jean Glasberg, Green Party City Councillor, says: “These letters make shocking reading. They provide the detail behind the recent national publicity on the scandalous failure of the water industry.”

The letter to Cambridge Water ², the supplier of the city’s water, states clearly that “Your current performance is a risk to the environment and security of supply…” and points out that there is an on-going deficit in the ‘supply-demand’ balance. Despite the alarms that have been raised, the company is still not addressing the challenge of supplying the rising need for water, much of it due to new development, nor has it reduced the impact of its abstractions on the environment, including harm to chalk streams. Perhaps not surprisingly, Cambridge Water’s 2025 draft Water Resources Management Plan has still not been approved by Defra.

The letter explains how, in 2019, Cambridge Water forecast the improvements it would have made by 2024, and shows that these have not been achieved. Key failures are: interruptions in supply (72% above the forecast and due mainly to system breakdowns or pollution); delay in installing water meters; and leakage from pipes. The significant increase in demand from the non-household sector, including new science parks, is not adequately addressed and there are questions over data accuracy. The company has until 29th November to explain the action it will take on the problems identified ³.

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Kathryn Fisher has been selected as Green Party candidate for the Histon and Impington by-election of 24 October 2024. More information here.

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Urgent action needed to tackle pollution, flooding and water shortages

Cambridgeshire residents are facing rising water bills with proposed price hikes of 13-14%¹. But we are confronted with polluted rivers and failing sewage treatment plants, dried up chalk streams, and both flooding and drought which are damaging agriculture, roads and other infrastructure and affecting our health. The water companies themselves predict an insufficient supply of water by 2030².

The Greens are therefore calling on the Council to declare full recognition of the water emergency, the impact that this is already having on communities, businesses and the environment in Cambridge, and the potentially disastrous consequences it is leading to.

Jean Glasberg says “The City Council declared biodiversity³ and climate⁴ emergencies in 2019, which have helped to raise awareness of, and accelerate action on these critical issues, including influencing planning and other decisions. We need a water emergency declaration for the same reasons. Global heating is causing extreme weather events which are having a serious impact on our water resources. Under the Climate Change Act 2008, water companies are legally obliged to take action to adapt to the future impacts of climate breakdown⁵. We need clear evidence that they are doing this.”

Urgent action is needed to address the current crisis, including full scrutiny of planning applications for large-scale developments. Full weight must be given to the evidence of the Environment Agency (a statutory consultee) in relation to water. The highest water efficiency standards should be required for any new developments, including mandatory greywater collection and recycling, a policy that the Greater Cambridge Shared Planning Service claims to promote but which is not being fully implemented.

Greens are also requesting the Council to write to the Rt Hon Angela Rayner to demand that planning matters in Cambridge and South Cambridgeshire remain under the control of the local authorities and asking for the Written Ministerial Statement on the Cambridge Delivery Group⁶, of May 2024, to be replaced with a new statement that requires greater priority to be given to water issues in local planning applications.

Cambridge has the potential to become a model ‘sponge’ city⁷, a concept being pursued in other cities, where the creation of places with multiple areas of greenery, trees, ponds, soakaways, pocket parks, rain gardens and permeable paving is actively encouraged. The Council needs to engage with the water companies, but also put pressure on them to cap abstraction from the Chalk aquifer at today’s levels, rapidly increase efforts to repair leaks, and manage demand more effectively. While the Council itself must do all it can to encourage residents to use less water, we also need accelerated introduction of universal metering and the prompt declaration of hosepipe bans when needed.

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Miranda Fyfe has been selected as Green Party prospective parliamentary candidate in South Cambridgeshire for the General Election 2024.

Miranda has lived in Cambridgeshire for over 30 years. An active member of the Stapleford village community, she has worked in NHS management and is a keen campaigner for Active Travel and public transport, who practises what she preaches. More information here.

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Abbey – Naomi Bennett

Elected with 52% of vote.

Coleridge – Sarah Nicmanis

Second with 34% of vote.

Newnham – Hugh Clough

Elected with 46% of vote.

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The full version of the manifesto can be found here. The shortened version is here.

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Cambridge had just under 7350 council homes in September 2023¹ but, by March this year, there were still almost 2800² people on the waiting list, indicating that the City needs some 40% more social housing to give everyone a roof over their head. Cambridge City Council prides itself on the speed with which it is building new homes and indeed, thanks to an injection of funding through the Greater Cambridge Partnership, it has built more than some local authorities: 316 council houses in the 4-year period 2013/14 to 2017/18, with plans and funding in place for 500 more³. But that still leaves many people stuck on the waiting list.

However, the City Council’s focus is now almost entirely on the misguided policy of ‘affordable’ housing. The Office of National Statistics deems a property ‘affordable’ if a householder has to spend only 30% of their gross income on rent, whilst acknowledging that there is no widely accepted standard on this⁴. In fact, the term ‘affordable’ is being used for a ragbag of situations encompassing social rented housing (council homes), affordable rent, subsidised home ownership, starter homes, discounted market sale housing and shared ownership⁵. The proposed 2024-2029 Greater Cambridge Housing Strategy⁷, the consultation on which closed last month, barely mentions social housing, stating only that the City Council will ‘provide some new council homes at 80% of market rents targeted at local workers’, although national guidance is that these should have rents at no more than 40-50% of the market rent⁶.

Sarah Nicmanis, Green Party candidate for Coleridge in the upcoming City Council elections, says: “Let’s be clear: affordable housing does not equate to social housing. The rush to provide it, without making enough available for those on council home waiting lists, will lead to growing homelessness. In Cambridge, developers’ profits appear too often to over-ride community needs. We urgently need a massive increase in the supply of genuine social housing. Radical solutions at national level are needed but, until then, we can be much more vigilant locally. Replacing social housing at 40% of market rent with so-called affordable housing at 80% might seem like a short-term solution for older homes with spiralling repair costs. However, it’s destroying the safety net for our most vulnerable families and building a major headache: councils will end up with soaring temporary accommodation bills, thus increasing pressure for cuts in council services, with every resident ultimately losing out.”

With the current astronomical rental prices in Cambridge (often over £1500 a month⁸), a vast number of new homes will be out of reach for local people; in Cambridge about four out of five people who rent properties cannot afford the average rent⁹. Cllr Elliot Tong (Abbey) says: “For those people who have had to move out of their council homes temporarily, because of demolition prior to re-building, the new rents may make their return impossible. This will further disrupt long-established local communities, the existence of which is so often overlooked by the wealthier, more itinerant, university and technology -based component of the city’s population.”

The Green Party considers that median local rents should take up no more than about 27% of gross income, for a one-income household on a median salary – this would be a ‘Living Rent’. At present, in Cambridge, as in other apparently wealthy cities such as Bristol¹¹, this is far from possible. As we point out in our consultation response to the proposed new Housing Strategy¹², commitment to the Right Homes, Right Place, Right Price charter¹³ would ensure that all new homes are built to the highest environmental standards, prioritising brownfield sites, while requiring all new developments to come with investment in local services.

The Housing Strategy is not yet approved, but planning applications have been submitted for the demolition of old council homes and their replacement with so-called affordable housing, such as the Ekin Road and recently approved Fanshawe Road developments. We can expect to see many more. The reasons why this is happening are many and not immediately resolvable: lack of suitable building space, the Right to Buy scheme (now widely recognised as disastrous)¹⁰, and the increasingly dilapidated council housing stock. But there are key steps we can take: the Housing Strategy must be more transparent about the current housing crisis; clearer policies should be set out for new social housing, with urgent discussion initiated on funding shortfalls; and current planning applications need much better scrutiny.

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Sarah Nicmanis, Green Party parliamentary candidate for Cambridge, speaking to the Environment and Community Scrutiny Committee on Thursday 21st March with reference to the Petition requesting that Cambridge City Council publically supports the Climate and Ecology Bill.

I speak as the Green Party parliamentary candidate for Cambridge City and on behalf of our local party Cambridge and South Cambridgeshire Green Party. Last month we released a petition calling for Cambridge City Council to declare its public support for the Climate and Ecology Bill, as of today re-named the Climate and Nature Bill. This Bill was introduced to Parliament by Green Party MP Caroline Lucas in 2020, and today was introduced again, as a cross-party bill by Alex Sobel, MP.

Our petition was signed by 86 people and quickly exceeded the 50 signatories that are required to bring it before this committee. We thank all those individuals who signed and showed their support for this initiative. Copies of the wording of the petition have been distributed around the chamber for you to refer to in the debate that follows my speech.

We ask that the representatives of our city who sit on Cambridge City Council declare their support for the Bill openly, and publicly in the local media. Cambridgeshire County Council has signed up to the Bill. The City Council is noticeable by its absence from the list of almost 350 local authorities that are in support. Cambridge is renowned worldwide for its expertise in climate and environmental science. By actively endorsing this bill, we reaffirm our city’s commitment to global leadership in sustainability and will inspire others to follow suit. With the Bill going before Parliament again, it is more urgent than ever that it gets full support across the country.

On Tuesday this week, the World Meteorological Organization sounded a ‘red alert’ to the world, having released a report confirming that 2023 was the hottest year on record by a clear margin, with records “once again broken, and in some cases smashed” for key indicators such as greenhouse gas pollution, surface temperatures, ocean heat and acidification, sea level rise, Antarctic sea ice cover and glacier retreat. In Cambridgeshire, we are seeing the dramatic effects of recent extreme weather events: intense rainfall partnered with hotter and drier summers are making roads unsafe for the public to use; agriculture has been badly hit by flooded fields; and chalk streams dried up during last years’ drought. As local residents and business owners, we are increasingly vulnerable to the impacts of extreme weather and climate events, as their frequency continues to rise.

The cross-party Climate and Nature Bill would require the UK to develop and achieve a new, more dynamic, necessarily urgent environmental strategy to: firstly, reduce greenhouse gases in line with the 1.5 degrees required under the UK’s Paris Agreement obligations;

• secondly, instate a measured path to recovery by 2030;
• thirdly, put nature, upon which our very existence depends;
• fourthly, end fossil fuel production and imports as rapidly as possible; and
• finally, provide for re-training for those currently employed by the fossil fuel industries.

We also request the Council to write to our MP Daniel Zeichner asking him to publicly support the Bill, along with the 130 or so other MPs who have already done so. And it’s not just councils and MPs who are behind the Bill: 881 organisations, politicians and scientists from all over the UK and across 12 political parties, as well as 42,000 members of the public who back it.

We urge Cambridge City Council to join other councils in solidarity, publicly support the Bill, and genuinely show that they and the City are true leaders in fighting climate change.

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