Nearly 2,000 pages of meeting papers to plough through for just four meetings.

Posted byCambridge Town OwlPosted inUncategorized

A snapshot of what an over-complicated and fragmented system of public service governance is like.

Imagine you are a resident living in a part of town where your neighbourhood is due to be comprehensively redeveloped (and with sound principles for doing so). That part of town is also where proposed transport infrastructure improvements are due – as are bus service improvements. At the same time, you or someone who lives with you has a chronic illness that requires you to go to Addenbrooke’s outpatients more times than you’d like.

While the first one doesn’t apply to me, it is one of my former civil service policy areas. So let’s take each one in turn.

  1. Cambridge City Council Housing Scrutiny Committee (just finished after a 5 hour meeting)
  2. Greater Cambridge Partnership Board (Which will be all day)
  3. Combined Authority Board (As above)
  4. CUH Governors (formerly the Addenbrooke’s Hospital Board of Governors) – meeting just before their public AGM on 27 Sept 2023.

Take your pick if you are an over-worked underpaid reporter having to scrutinise all of the above.

For Housing Scrutiny, the main item was the future of the Ekin Road Neighbourhood which Cait Findlay reported on here. Campaigners have set up a website here, and given the circumstances this is one of those very complex areas of local government where disruption is inevitable but where at some stage the work needs carrying out. It is something made all the more difficult by the Margaret Thatcher’s policy of the mass sale of council houses (with the receipts from the sales going back into HM Treasury coffers rather than recycled into a new generation of council housing) which means some homes will be council houses, some privately owned and lived in, while others are in the hands of private sector landlords able to charge ‘market rates’ for all-too-often poorly-maintained ex-council stock. (Just ask ACORN Cambridge, the local branch of the national communities and tenants’ union, ACORN Union).

For the GCP Board, see my previous blogpost. We shouldn’t be in this situation but we are.

For the Combined Authority, again we should not be in this situation but the soon to be removed Leader of Peterborough City Council (according to CambsNews) wielded his Council’s veto against the Mayor’s Local Transport and Connectivity Plan (something the Mayor has a duty to create – but one where the leaders of Peterborough unitary, and Cambridgeshire County Councils were given vetos over by ministers in 2016) so we’re back again – hence over 1,000 pages of meeting papers.

For Addenbrooke’s (and The Rosie amongst other services provided by CUH NHS), today is Doctors’ Strike Day. I still support them even though I know patients currently in Addenbrooke’s who could really do with them not being on strike. The buck stops with ministers such as the MP for North East Cambridgeshire who has been a woeful Health Secretary. Cambridgeshire Tories have a lot to answer for given they also selected Andrew Lansley as MP for South Cambridgeshire, enabling David Cameron to make him Health Secretary in the disastrous ‘reforms’ that have since been scrapped. £2billion down the drain.

Above: ***Lots of meeting papers***

“How in the world is *anyone* supposed to scrutinise all of that?”

Remember none of the above covers schools – because of the academies programme under Michael Gove when he was Education Secretary. On BBC Look East earlier the schools in Essex affected by the RAAC aerated crumbling concrete scandal were no longer the responsibilities of the county council, but rather the academy chains that took them over. I wonder how many of those chains will find themselves in serious financial difficulties if they don’t get bailed out by central government? (I covered the impact of this fragmentation of local education structures here).

People should not need a university-level education to understand the essential of local public services.

Yet that is where we’ve ended up.

I’ve lost track of the policy areas where the over-complicatedness (i.e. something that could and should be simplified) of current systems only benefit the wealthy because they can afford to pay the professionals to navigate it for them Such as town planning and tax policy. It’s not the working class people on below-median-level incomes and who live in council or social housing – or in substandard private accommodation who lobbied hard for those tax breaks for the wealthy, or the lack of a levy on land value uplift when new public transport infrastructure is built or a new local plan allocates agricultural land for development.

Anyway, if anyone wants to table a public question to the AGM of Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Trust (Addenbrooke’s and the Rosie), see the webpage here for the details.

And if you think everything can and should be simplified

…even by a small amount, see the new Cambridgeshire Unitaries campaign after which I hope we find out more once Michael Gove has made his mind up.

If you are interested in the longer term future of Cambridge, and on what happens at the local democracy meetings where decisions are made, feel free to:

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