Reaction after South Cambs leader asks government for East West Rail plans

Two letters in the Cambridge Independent question Councillor Bridget Smith’s stance towards the East West Rail project. Cllr Smith, leader of South Cambridgeshire District Council, has sent a letter to transport secretary Louise Haigh asking for clarification on ‘the route, the location of stations, the timeline and whether it will be electrified.’

The East West Rail project would provide a direct rail line from Oxford to Cambridge via Bletchley/Milton Keynes and Bedford. New stations are planned at Tempsford and Cambourne. In her letter to the transport secretary, Cllr Smith indicates that the South Cambridgeshire District Council ‘support[s] the principle of an East West Rail link and a mainline station serving Cambourne’. But she feels ‘out of the loop entirely when it comes to the government’s plans for EWR’.

Two letters to the editor challenge Cllr Smith in a number of areas, including the cost, the impact to the environment and unsustainable population growth.

Negatives of East West Rail overlooked

Nick Burton, Trustee of the campaigning group, Stop the Arc, objects to Cllr Smith complaining about lack of information. According to Mr Burton:

  • Cllr Smith supports East West Rail despite it having a poor business case and an unsustainable environmental impact. He says the cost of East West Rail is 60 times the cost of Crossrail and would be of little value to the 2,000 Cambridge commuters estimated to use the rail line.

  • Cllr Smith does not engage with the public but instead employs a form of ‘greenwashing’, where growth is characterised as ‘doubling nature’.

  • Cllr Smith didn’t challenge misleading evidence from the Treasury to the Public Accounts Committee. According to Mr Burton, the Treasury incorrectly said that South Cambridgeshire District Council and other local authorities were involved in the secretive government body, the East West Rail Economic Growth Board.

  • Cllr Smith failed to object to the reduction of the East West Rail consultation period from 12 to eight weeks.

Growth beyond the local plan

Great Shelford resident Annabel Sykes has written in to object to Cllr Smith’s support for East West Rail. She says that Cllr Smith and the Cambridgeshire District support the substantial growth that is planned to accompany East West Rail, including:

  • A potential increase in the number of jobs at the Cambridge Biomedical Campus (CBC) by 20,000 in the next two decades, with land in South Cambridgeshire opened up for development.

  • A population increase between Bedford and Cambridge of approximately 213,300 people, including new houses at Cambourne for 53,400 people, an almost seven-fold increase in Camborne’s size.

Ms Sykes notes the discrepancy between growth planned with East West Rail and that specified in the Greater Cambridge Local Plan – First Proposals (November 2021). She says that First Proposals calls for a rather modest 19-hectare extension to the Biomedical Campus and 1,950 new homes at Cambourne.

Ms Sykes would also like Cllr Smith to identify how East West Rail would actually contribute to transport issues in South Cambridgeshire. She says that the National Audit Office, in its investigation into the business case and strategic need for East West Rail, asked the government and East West Rail to indicate how the benefits of the railway would be delivered.


Jean Prince