More new-build houses worth over £40m to be demolished at Darwin Green in Cambridge

More than 80 new-build homes - with a potential sale value of over £40 million - will be demolished and rebuilt, after more defects were discovered.

Foundation issues were found at dozens of houses at the Darwin Green development in Cambridge - as developers admitted in June that 36 fully-built properties needed to be knocked down.

That number has now more than doubled to 83, according to the Local Democracy Reporting Service.

It was revealed in documents submitted to Cambridge City Council, as developers, Barratt and David Wilson Homes Cambridgeshire, applied for permission to demolish the homes.

The additional homes are not yet fully built, but work on them will need to be restarted.

The developers said tiles and other materials would be salvaged where possible, and concrete and brick would be crushed on site and reused.

At a city council meeting earlier this month, planning officers said they did not believe permission for the demolition work would be given before the end of October.

The Darwin Green estate is still being built and when completed, it will be made up of around 1,500 homes.

The homes sell for at least £575,000 each, with some selling for as much as £850,000.

Developers said in June that it was a "small number" of unoccupied homes that "did not meet its usual high standards".

At the time, one councillor said people's "lives and dreams" had been "shattered", while another called for an independent inquiry.

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