The Greater Cambridge Partnership’s proposals for buses and congestion charging finally collapse as the GCP Board refuses to recommend amended proposals to Cambridgeshire County Council to bring in a charge on motorists to fund improved bus services
Watch this clip from the Chair of the GCP, Cllr Elisa Meschini (Labour – King’s Hedges Division) at the end of the debate. Note the public questions listed in the meeting papers – the ones for item 6 being applicable.
Less that 24 hours before the meeting was due to commence, the Cambridge Independent published this splash:
Above – click & scroll down to read the statement in full here
In the course of the debate at the GCP Board, it became clear that:
- The Leader of the Liberal Democrat group on Cambridge City Council, Cllr Tim Bick – also the Chair of the GCP Assembly and one-time former leader of Cambridge City Council who co-negotiated the original City Deal in 2013-14, did not concur with the statement
- The Leader of South Cambridgeshire District Council, Cllr Bridget Smith, had not been consulted on the statement
- The Deputy Leader of Cambridgeshire County Council and chair of the GCP Board, Elisa Meschini, was not consulted before the statement was published.
This inevitably cause more than a little party political fallout both within and between political parties – something that now risks mirroring what happened in Oxfordshire only over a different issue. I hope they manage to avoid that situation because as I have said to local politicians of all the parties with elected councillors in/around Cambridge, the problem is the broken structures.
This means Cambridgeshire County Council will not need to vote on bringing in congestion charging. Under the current structure, congestion charging at a local level won’t happen. It would need significant moves in Westminster to bring it back – noting this paper by the LGA here. Note Cllr Brian Milnes, representing South Cambridgeshire District Council, confirmed that his party (The Liberal Democrats – the largest component of the joint administration at New Shire Hall) were split on whether to go with the proposals (have a listen here), but that the announcement above meant that the Political consensus within Cambridgeshire Liberal Democrats to proceed was not there. He also confirmed that similar reservations were made within his own council group.
“The clue for this group is in the title – the Greater Cambridge Partnership. And that’s what it was until about four weeks ago.”
Cllr Mike Davey (Lab – Coleridge) – Leader of Cambridge City Council.
Cllr Davey then said that in his opinion it was at the instigation of the Liberal Democrats’ MP candidates (Pippa Heylings and Ian Sollom, for South Cambridgeshire and the new Mid-Cambs and St Neots constituencies respectively) that Lib Dems’ support should be pulled.
Accordingly, both Cllrs Milnes and Davey voted to reject the recommendation to put the proposals to Cambridgeshire County Council – that council having the legal powers to bring in a congestion charge.
“It has been clear for a while where this was going”
Cllr Elisa Meschini (Lab – King’s Hedges Division) Chair of the GCP
It must have been the toughest speeches each of those councillors will have made in their political careers. Irrespective of viewpoint, I don’t envy them being in that situation. I said as much a couple of days ago at Prof Sarah Sharples lecture to one of the GCP officers who was at that event, knowing that this meeting was coming up and a crunch decision had to be made by the Board. As the officer concerned mentioned, I have been following the meetings and decisions of the GCP since its inception nearly a decade ago. So it’s a strange feeling I have listening to the speeches of the three senior councillors having gotten this far, only to fall at the last. But then had they voted it through, it surely would have been rejected by full council at New Shire Hall, so in one sense they cut their losses.
“So…what’s Plan B?”
There is no Plan B. That was the risk that senior GCP officers took. And it did not pay off. Hence why I said the GCP Board meeting was make or break. Had the proposals been brought in straight after a general election that had resulted in a stable government happy not to intervene, and after a county council election that was happy to take the risk of losing seats in a subsequent election, they might have driven the proposals through. But with a general election looming and a joint administration with the narrowest of majorities, that wasn’t going to happen.
The emotional fallout.
Some of you will have heard the applause in the council chamber in Cambourne on the video footage. For those who opposed the congestion charge because they had crunched the numbers and found the impact to be significant enough to threaten their businesses – and who had campaigned for some time against it, I can understand the relief that the decision has brought. Who wouldn’t? At the same time I can also understand the devastation that those who publicly supported the proposals (taking a huge amount of criticism along the way) as a last chance in the face of the climate emergency for *something radical* in response.
In my case, I just feel numb more than anything else.
I’m not jumping up and down thinking: “Let’s get cracking on light rail!” The simple reason is that local residents who spoke to me during local elections taught me that our collective level of political literacy and local governance literacy are not nearly at the levels they need to be in order to get cracking on anything. Part of the problem is the challenge of misinformation and disinformation. It’s not something that is primarily about what people were/were not taught at school.
Hence why instead of following the GCP meeting I tabled a public question to Cambridge City Council’s Planning and Transport Scrutiny Committee on how we can educate and familiarise more people in our city about town planning processes given what we’ve experienced, are going through, and have looming in the distant future. You can view the video of my question, followed by the responses from Cllr Katie Thornburrow (Lab – Petersfield) here.
In the past, I’ve assumed people were more than familiar with the depth of knowledge I’ve accumulated over an extended period of time. Furthermore, all too often when finding out the opposite, I’ve ‘brain-dumped’ that knowledge – which is intense and overwhelming for anyone on the receiving end of it.
Which is why I’ve learnt (the hard way) that I’m not the best person to do those intros. Far better to lend/give a professionally-produced text (i.e. a book or magazine) and let people decide what they want to with it, and leave it be. Hence before the meeting started, I distributed some second-hand books (in excellent condition) to most of the councillors on the committee, including the books below. This was to reinforce the point about what materials are out there, and how town planning and transport planning are missing – in particular with the GCSE Citizenship Studies syllabus – excellent as it is irrespective of the Home-Office-Style front cover.
Above – GCSE Citizenship Studies by Mike Mitchell (There is a newer version) and also Politics for Beginners, part of the Usborne for Beginners series – Cllr Divkovic represents Arbury ward, historically one of Cambridge’s most economically-deprived wards, hence making the point that having that series available in Arbury Court Library might help make some subjects more accessible not just to children but to their parents too. In particular those that are traditionally written for an academic audience. I’m of the view that the best introduction books for many subjects are the ones that are written for children and young adults, rather than text-heavy academic tomes!
“So, when are we gonna get this light rail thing then?”
This was why I also distributed recent back copies of the LRTA’s magazine because the statement from senior Liberal Democrats mentioned above specifically name-checked trams and light rail.
“Looking further ahead we emphasise the need for a long term and ambitious transport vision. This would include better buses, trams, light rail and trains; transport hubs where people can safely transfer between buses, trams etc and from bikes or cars; and combined tickets for our journeys.“
Cambridge Independent, 27 Sept 2023
I linked this to the new transport policy adopted by the Liberal Democrats nationally at their party conference a few days before.
“Conference believes that…Providing bus, tram and rail links boosts local economies and enables people to access a wider range of local services….Within an Integrated Transport Strategy there remain, in some locations, opportunities for expanding the use of light rail (trams and tram trains) a form of green mass transport with less costly infrastructure than heavy rail.”
Liberal Democrat Policy Motion: Connecting Communities – Building a Transport Network Fit for the 21st Century – passed by its conference, Sept 2023
The point being that if trams are going to become an integral part of their national and local/county party groups, then providing councillors with hard copies of an otherwise not-easy-to-find magazine that specialises in that subject is one way to familiarise decision-makers with content written by experts in the field and those that have achieved what we’d like for Cambridge. One of the magazines also introduced councillors to the speech by Norman Baker MP (Liberal Democrat former Transport Minister in the coalition) on his ten point plan for light rail. (You can read it here). Note the former minister expressed disappointment that the GCP opted for busways instead of light rail when I put a question to him at a webinar organised by the LRTA in late 2022. He’s now the Director of External Affairs at the Campaign for Better Transport.
“The GCP is not going to have new tramway and light rail plans ready for approval in the next few months”
In one sense, what happens next is sort of out of their hands. Michael Gove has his keynote speech looming, and in less than three months time the Chair of Homes England has to report back on proposals for ‘supercharging Cambridge’. Both of these will have happened by the time the GCP Board next meets on 14 December 2023. A huge amount of things could happen between now and that meeting.
With the vetoing (again) of the Combined Authority’s Local Transport and Connectivity Plan by the Leader of Peterborough City Council – one whose hold on power is hanging by a thread, the next full council meeting of that council has a realistic prospect of passing a motion of no confidence. The date of that meeting? 18 October 2023. Twenty days-and-counting. Down. The next round of meetings for the Combined Authority are not until November. By which time their Peterborough issues might be less of a concern.
In the meantime, the one big opportunity for improving Cambridge’s transport network is for active travel routes. Several campaigners have made the case for ramping up progress on that front – even more so given the confirmation that transport schemes out of South East Cambridge have been put on hold. Far better to use the resources allocated (but no longer sufficient for the planned busways) for new active travel routes instead.
Will that happen?
We’ll have to wait and see. Alternatively email your councillors via https://www.writetothem.com/ or get involved with Living Streets Cambridge and take things from there.
Food for thought?
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