East Cambs District Council considering how to stop Sunnica

East Cambs District Council is urgently grappling with two announcements by the new Labour Government.

Sec of State Ed Miliband, just eight days into his new job, went against the recommendation for refusal by the independent Inspector and granted planning permission for the massive 2,500-acre Sunnica solar farm near Burwell, Isleham, Chippenham, Fordham, Kennett and Snailwell.

This application has loomed over local people for some five years and the district council and others have fought against it.

An impression of the solar farm by Sebastian Ganso from Pixabay (Image: Sebastian Ganso from Pixabay)

This cynical proposal, to be built in the countryside on high grade food production land, includes vast battery storage warehousing which will allow Sunnica to draw power from the national grid at non-peak hours when it is cheaper and sell it back to the grid during peak hours at a more expensive rate.

All four councils involved are now considering next steps to see what action can be taken.

And in another rushed announcement, Labour has broken its manifesto commitment to build 300,000 new houses per year, increasing that to 370,000, incidentally the same level of building proposed by the Liberal Democrats.

For us in East Cambridgeshire, where we have been hitting an almost unprecedented rate of almost two per cent growth in new homes for the last two years, the proposed new housing target will increase by 12 per cent to 655 new homes every year.

The frustration is that the Government is proposing nothing to give powers to the council to make the developers build the thousands of homes that have already been granted permission but not yet delivered.

Sadly, Labour’s planning reforms are highly likely to see councils all over the country losing control of their five-year housing land supply, which will result in unplanned development outside the development envelopes in unsustainable locations in the countryside with no accompanying infrastructure.

The Government’s eight-week consultation begins, just as the country sets off for its summer holidays!

(Image: East Cambs District Council)