The asks
What would fix it
Finishing the whole 2016 network will now cost more than is already committed — ten years of delay and rising prices have seen to that. But most of what follows costs little or nothing, and none of it requires anyone to want the network less. It is about turning decisions into infrastructure faster, so that the next decade's money buys more than the last decade's did. Three of them matter far more than the rest, and they are marked.
What we're asking for
Finish the full 2016 vision
Not a smaller version of it. Every dropped bridge, river crossing and village link the 2016 review recommended is still the right piece of infrastructure; none of what follows is a case for building less. It will now cost more than it would have in 2017. That is a reason to start, not to stop. The reforms below are how it becomes affordable: fewer consultation rounds, one consent, land secured up front — more of every pound reaching the ground, sooner. And as Greater Cambridge grows, developer contributions should help pay for it.
One consenting process, not four
A statutory route order for active travel schemes, equivalent to a Transport and Works Act Order, settling alignment, land and planning together with one window for legal challenge, then finality.
Use the compulsory purchase powers that already exist
The county council has held them since 1980 and used them for roads and the busway. They have never been used for a greenway.
Fund it like a programme, not like twelve annual bids
A multi-year, ring-fenced capital settlement for the whole network, agreed once, instead of scheme-by-scheme budget lines that make descoping the easiest response to rising costs.
Consultation
Consultation is how consent is built. Run badly it becomes a way of deferring decisions, and the villages that were asked three times and given nothing are the ones least likely to believe the fourth request.
Settle the corridor once, at plan stage
Fix route corridors through the Local Plan and Local Transport Plan, consulted once. After adoption, consultation covers design detail — surfacing, crossings, lighting — not whether the route exists.
Every greenway has been consulted at least twice on its alignment, in 2019 and again in 2022–23, and several a third time. Each round reopens settled questions and resets the clock.
Publish a delivery date with every consultation
State the date the route opens if approved. When it slips, require a public explanation to the Executive Board.
The Fulbourn business case named 2026 as its opening year. That date has not been met on any published evidence, no revised date has been set, and GCP's monthly Greenways updates — otherwise a genuinely useful public record — stopped mentioning the route at exactly the point it should have explained the slip.
Publish both results, and say in advance which one decides
Where a scheme serves a wider population than the village it passes through, publish the local and the corridor-wide result side by side, and state the decision rule before consulting, not after.
Grantchester voted 73% against; the consultation overall was 64% in favour. Both numbers were true, and the failure to say beforehand which would govern turned a disagreement into a grievance and then into litigation.
Make re-consultation a decision, not a habit
Re-consulting on an alignment already approved should require a board decision recording what has materially changed.
Re-consultation is the cheapest way to look responsive while delivering nothing, and it is indistinguishable from delay to the people being asked.
Legal challenge
Nobody should lose the right to challenge a public body. But a scheme that can be attacked at four separate stages, years apart, is not a scheme anyone can plan to deliver.
A statutory route order for active travel
Create a single consenting route for walking and cycling schemes, equivalent to a Transport and Works Act Order: one process settling alignment, land and planning together, one window for challenge, then finality.
A greenway can currently be contested at consultation, at planning, at the traffic regulation order and by judicial review — four bites, spread over years. The busway that carries the county's best cycle route got one process and got built.
Write down every assurance given to a parish council
Require a published written note of commitments made in meetings between officers or members and parish councils, issued within ten working days.
The Grantchester challenge turned entirely on what was said in an undocumented meeting on 17 October 2022. A one-paragraph minute would have ended the claim before it was filed.
An expedited track for active travel challenges
Extend the Planning Court's expedited procedure to active travel schemes, targeting six months from decision to determination.
Grantchester took fifteen months from decision to judgment and the claim failed on every ground. The delay was the cost, whatever the outcome.
Land
This is the one that decides everything else. The routes that got built are the ones that fitted inside the highway boundary. The routes that needed a field edge are still being negotiated a decade later.
Use the compulsory powers that already exist
Adopt a policy that where a route is in the adopted plan and negotiation has not concluded within twelve months, compulsory purchase proceeds in parallel with continued negotiation.
Cambridgeshire County Council holds these powers under sections 239, 240, 249 and 250 of the Highways Act 1980, and used them for the Huntingdon link road in 2011. Government guidance expressly permits running compulsory purchase alongside negotiation rather than after it fails. For the greenways the powers have never been used.
Make public path creation orders the standard backstop
Use section 26 of the Highways Act 1980 to create paths over short field-edge gaps where agreement cannot be reached.
A public path creation order is a far lighter instrument than a full compulsory purchase order and exists for exactly this situation — a few hundred metres of field edge standing between two finished sections.
Negotiate across the whole network, once
Run land assembly as a single programme covering all routes, not scheme by scheme.
This was the 2016 review's own first recommendation — that a start be made on land negotiations "on a whole network basis, because the same landowner will be involved in a number of different routes". It was never done, and land consent is the stated blocker on Waterbeach, Swaffham, Bottisham and Haslingfield today.
Fund land up front
Ring-fence a land acquisition budget for the programme so that land cost stops being a trigger for descoping.
The Ditton Lane underpass was dropped partly on land acquisition cost; the Sawston railway link and the St Ives Over spur are paused on construction cost. Descoping is what happens when land has no budget line of its own.
Give the development corporation's land powers a greenway job
If the new Greater Cambridge Development Corporation is given compulsory purchase powers, include the unfinished 2016 network in its first infrastructure plan.
The government announced the corporation in June 2026 and laid the order to establish it. Its powers are still being settled, and are expected to include land assembly, with compulsory purchase "where necessary". Growth on this scale will need the routes, and a body set up to assemble land for growth is well placed to secure them.
Funding
The problem has not been a lack of money — GCP's own budget papers commit roughly £108m to the twelve routes, 30% more than was approved in 2020. It is how that money arrives and how slowly and inefficiently it turns into infrastructure: scheme by scheme, year by year, always up for renegotiation, while construction prices rise.
Commit the whole programme's funding once, not scheme by scheme
Agree a single, ring-fenced multi-year capital settlement for the full twelve-route programme, rather than annual budget lines that can be trimmed route by route as costs rise.
The National Audit Office found that English councils have navigated 36 separate active travel funding streams since 2016, mostly one-year settlements — a structure the Public Accounts Committee links directly to short-termism and descoping. Copenhagen's equivalent cycle programme is co-funded by the Danish state through dedicated multi-year cycling funding, not competitive annual bidding.
Name the greenways in the levy's spending plans
When the Community Infrastructure Levy is adopted, list the 2016 greenway network by name among the infrastructure it will fund, in the councils' annual infrastructure funding statements.
The councils propose the levy to pay for "strategic transport infrastructure". Their infrastructure statement does not mention greenways or cycling. The County Council's own response asked that levy-funded transport "prioritise safe, direct, and inclusive walking, wheeling, and cycling routes from the start".
Make the Waterbeach model the rule
Where a site allocated in the new Local Plan sits on a greenway corridor, require its planning obligations to build the connecting greenway section, open as early as the first homes.
It works. Waterbeach New Town's developer built a new bridge over the A10 and upgraded the Mere Way byway to Landbeach as a condition of planning. Marleigh built wide cycleways and a path to Ditton Lane, open by 2023. Both were delivered faster than the programme's own routes on the same corridors.
Accountability
Ten years produced twelve named routes, thirteen budget lines and one finished greenway. The programme is legible; its delivery is not.
Protect the corridors in the Local Plan
Safeguard every greenway alignment in the Local Plan so that development cannot foreclose it.
Routes crossing land with development value lose to that value unless they are protected before the application arrives.
One body, one published delivery schedule
Publish a route-by-route delivery date for all twelve greenways, reported against quarterly, with slippage explained.
The monthly updates describe activity in detail and completion almost never. There is no published date by which the network is finished.
Sign the route when the route is finished
Put up end-to-end greenway signs, with the route's name and a completion plaque, only when a greenway meets the 2016 standard along its whole length. Until then, publish at each end what is still missing and when it will be done.
The 2016 review recommended naming the routes and signing them consistently, and treated naming as "a major commitment". The names have been given out; the integrated signing never followed. A greenway sign should mean the route is finished, not that a programme exists.
The routes were the right routes. The standard was the right standard. What is missing is a way of turning a decision into a path on the ground in less than a decade.