london

Prime location: the Napp Building, one of the research facilities at Cambridge Science Park. Credit: CORBIS/PATRICK WARD

Local authorities in the east of England are preparing to defend controversial plans to restrict the numbers of new high-technology companies setting up near the city of Cambridge.

The plans are being opposed by business organizations which want new information technology and biotechnology companies to be located on the outskirts of Cambridge near existing clusters of such businesses, as well as the university and the science parks.

The newly formed East of England Business Group is to challenge the proposed planning restrictions at a public examination starting on 2 February. Last month, a report commissioned by the group of 10 business organizations, which includes the Confederation of British Industry and the Institute of Directors, said restrictions would damage prosperity and economic growth.

Written by the Cambridge-based management consultancy Segal Quince Wicksteed, the report says that planning restrictions will conflict with a recent government white paper, which promised to find ways of supporting clusters of high-technology industries (see Nature 396, 714-715; 1998).

But the Standing Conference of East Anglian Local Authorities (SCEALA), which covers the three counties of Cambridgeshire, Norfolk and Suffolk, says it wants to restrict the pace of development in Cambridge's existing technology clusters, and to regenerate other, more deprived urban areas.

Authorities belonging to SCEALA are concerned that the region has too few skilled workers to meet continued growth in Cambridge's high-technology sector. Staff would have to be recruited from outside the region, leading to greater pressures on roads and housing, which the counties wish to avoid.

The Cambridge region is home to more than 1,200 high-technology businesses, compared to 350 in the mid-1980s. It is one of Britain's most prosperous regions. Between 1991 and 1996 it accounted for all regional growth in employment. Some parts of Norfolk and Suffolk, by contrast, have employment rates and incomes per head below the UK average.

The previous Conservative government tried to ease the pressure on Cambridge, and to reduce the regional economic disparity, by encouraging high-technology businesses to move to poorer rural areas. These would be linked by new roads to major inter-city roads, enabling staff to commute.

The new Labour government has taken a different approach. It cut the roads programme last year. And the SCEALA authorities, which have changed from being predominantly under Conservative control, to Labour, have decided to concentrate on urban — rather than rural — regeneration. In addition, a government committee chaired by architect Lord Richard Rogers said last week that new housing should be built on disused ‘brownfield’ manufacturing sites in urban areas and not on ‘greenfield’ rural sites.

Under SCEALA's proposed planning restrictions, new businesses would be encouraged to locate in or near towns and cities other than Cambridge. The strategy also aims to encourage greater use of public transport for travel to work.

But Bill Wicksteed of Segal Quince Wicksteed says that preventing the growth of clusters of high-technology businesses will ultimately disadvantage local communities as well as the high-technology industry itself.

“Growth should not be grudgingly accepted, but embraced and shaped,” says Wicksteed. “If [local authorities] work from an assumption that growth must be resisted, they will fail. They will get growth, but they will be unable to control it.”

The Wicksteed report believes that it is inappropriate for SCEALA to try to integrate its technology management policies with the aim of urban regeneration. And it doubts whether technology companies will want to move to areas where they may not be able to find enough qualified staff.

The controversy will intensify the government's difficulties over a planning application from the Wellcome Trust for a genomics research complex on the outskirts of Cambridge, which the local authority opposes. Prospects for the complex will not have been helped by the recent resignation of industry secretary Peter Mandelson, the architect of the government's decision to promote knowledge-based industry.