Ian Sollom MP lays out his concerns around the Cambridge Development Company and its impact on local people and communities

No one seriously disputes that our part of the world faces real challenges in sustainable growth. Housing is unaffordable for many. Transport infrastructure has struggled to keep pace with growth. Water supply and sewage treatment systems need upgrading if we are not to irrevocably damage our environment.

The government's consultation on a new Development Corporation acknowledges all of this. The question now is whether the government's proposed solution actually addresses any of it.

The biggest challenges we face in and around Cambridge are not primarily local planning barriers, but national level infrastructure funding decisions and utility regulation that prevents forward investment. To take sewage treatment as an example, the government itself chose not to fund the relocation of the Cambridge Waste Water Treatment Works – which, regardless of your views on the site, is at best an eccentric decision when just a few months earlier the same government approved the planning application and keeps talking about its ambitions for growth in Cambridge. And meanwhile Anglian Water continues to raise formal concerns about planning applications across our area due to sewage treatment capacity.

I could list similar eccentricities in transport, power and water supply decision making – and regular readers of the Cambridge Independent will be well familiar with them. The thing is, none of the problems are caused by local planning. And none of them are fixed by changing who takes planning decisions. There are getting on for 40,000 homes with planning approval in the Greater Cambridge Shared Planning Service area that haven’t yet been built – the planning committees clearly aren’t the blocker. So why a Development Corporation for Cambridge?

Development Corporations can work. But the historical success cases that could justify optimism – for example, London Docklands, the Olympic Delivery Authority – show some important features: they were vehicles for a clearly defined political commitment, backed by funding to match, and with a specific task that everyone could understand. With London Docklands it was to transform derelict, post-industrial land into a commercial district; with the Olympics it was to build a park, venues and Olympic infrastructure by a fixed date, then hand back control. In both cases you could say what success looked like, and when it would be achieved. That clarity is what gave those bodies the authority to cut through – and what made the democratic trade-off arguable, even if contested.

The proposal for Cambridge has none of those features. The consultation's ambition is sweeping but oddly shapeless. The Development Corporation would operate for "at least 25 years." The government has committed "up to £400 million" – conditional language against infrastructure requirements the consultation's own figures suggest run to many multiples of that. There is no defined task, no fixed endpoint, no honest account of what specifically will be built where and when. The Development Corporation is a substitute for strategic choices the government hasn't actually made yet – and residents across the area deserve better than that.

The clearest illustration of this is what the consultation defines as a "strategic" planning application: 250 dwellings. That is not Canary Wharf. That is a medium-sized housing development in one of our villages – the kind of application that directly shapes existing neighbourhoods, that residents currently have meaningful ability to engage with through their locally elected council. Under these proposals, those decisions would instead be taken by a board appointed by the Secretary of State, with local leaders merely "invited" to participate. If you are unhappy with the outcome, you cannot vote them out. You cannot even vote them in. For 25 years.

The government will say this is strategic intervention in the national interest. But Docklands and the Olympics were strategic precisely because the intervention was specific, time-limited and defined. What is being proposed here is, to all intents and purposes, a shadow planning authority for the whole of Cambridge and South Cambridgeshire, with a mandate vague enough to mean almost anything over the next quarter century.

Communities are being asked to give up democratic control over decisions that affect their daily lives, in exchange for a commitment with no clear shape or end.

That is not a trade-off that has been honestly put to the people who live here.