New findings from the first Great Cambridge Crash Course workshop

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People have ***lots of questions*** about how Cambridge is governed, but our city is not putting on the events or making the spaces available for the public to ask and discuss them

First of all a big ***Thank you*** to the 15 people who took part in the first Great Cambridge Crash Course at Rock Road Library on the last day of September. I’m glad most of you found the discussions more than useful, and that you got to talk to people you had not met before.

As requested by many of the participants, I will be running future events on a similar format of multiple group discussions where we find out ‘How Cambridge got to here’.

Combining local history with local public policy scrutiny

For someone who spent the 2010s making a big deal about social media, this was an event that didn’t involve electronic devices at all. It was all paper-and-pen based. And deliberately so. I wanted the focus of the workshop to be each other rather than a big screen.

The troubles of the Greater Cambridge Partnership was a major issue that participants had a wealth of questions about

Anyone involved in the GCP, whether officer or councillor, would have come away from that workshop with a sense that the civic ground work was not put in place early on, and more time should have been spent working with those most likely to be affected by the policies/projects in those early days than actually took place.

The collapse of the political consensus on the Sustainable Travel Zone for Cambridge has created the space for conversations on how Cambridge is governed.

That does not automatically mean “Yes! Unitary council – here we come!“ The ‘crash course’ bit to get to the GCP discussions involved covering nearly 200 years of local government history in maps just to get to that point. That involved showing maps from this old county council publication from the late 1950s of previous attempts at redrawing boundaries. Furthermore, we also explored the role of Parliament and Ministers of the Crown in relation to who gets to decide what when it comes to overhauling local councils.

“The game changing deal was announced by the Chancellor of the Exchequer in his budget speech this year and follows intensive negotiation with Cambridge City Council, South Cambridgeshire District Council, Cambridgeshire County Council, The University of Cambridge and the Greater Cambridge Greater Peterborough Enterprise Partnership.”

GovUK annoucing Cambridge City Deal agreement, 20 June 2014

Being able to debate the role of Ministers and Parliament in creating the governance structures for Cambridge and Cambridgeshire opened a new avenue for people to ask questions about – serious ones such as whether Parliament has provided enough detailed scrutiny about the functioning of city deals. This matters because these discussions can then inform the questions that residents put to candidates in the looming general election. What may surprise some of you was that these points didn’t come up through loaded or leading points from me. Having taken participants through previous eras of local government overhauls, and having summarised how ministers are accountable to MPs in Parliament, they came up with what they saw as some major shortcomings in the policy-making processes that led to the signing of the City Deal and the creation of the Greater Cambridge Partnership.

The difference between telling people what you think is wrong with ‘the system’ versus providing people with means to figure out what is wrong with the system for themselves is significant.

I could have made a video, I could have written a blogpost, but in the end neither would have had the impact that the group discussion had. By the time we had got to discussing the GCP/CPCA structures, the participants were familiar with how we got to the two-tier district/shire structure of local government in Cambridge/Cambridgeshire. I did not need to state an opinion when summarising the processes that ministers took regarding the decision to create City Deals and Combined Authorities. Participants raised a number of issues including:

  • What were the merits of adding the GCP on top of the existing structures?
  • Who decided the University of Cambridge should be part of the GCP?
  • Who decided ‘the business sector’ should be a part of the GCP?
  • Who decided we should have a Combined Authority?

My response was broadly that all of these decisions were taken by Ministers and that they were the ones who had to explain them to MPs in Parliament, with MPs ultimately being accountable in principle to their constituents. Participants were more than willing and able to identify what they saw as weaknesses and flaws in that system.

Party politics was hardly raised

Beyond having to acknowledge the political parties in government at the time decisions were taken – not just recently but with the abandoned proposals for a Cambridge unitary in Lord Redcliffe-Maud’s proposals from 1969, no one felt the need to make the issues ‘party political’. That wasn’t the purpose of the workshop. Furthermore, it was a useful self-disciplinary line for me that kept me focused on the subject – the governance structures of our city, rather than Political comment.

There were a few councillors and candidates past and present (three parties represented), but they were very much in the minority and were also a positive presence in the room, being able to summarise specific issues or provide a useful anecdote to illustrate a complex point. Which as an organiser and facilitator is what you not only want, but also need in a workshop like this. It’s that soft influence and informal ‘authoritative comment’ that helps keep discussions going, and also reduces the risk of those workshop sections being a one-way conversation between presenter/facilitator and participants.

It’s only now that I realise I spent the entire session standing while the participants sat around a single set of group tables in a rectangle.

That in itself encouraged conversations between participants and the small groups they broke out into during the exercises. It wasn’t a ‘theatre style’ layout. As mentioned, I assumed I was going to be sat at the table but in the end more than double the number of people arrived and took part so I took a step back and let them organise the layout.

“Can we have another one?”

Most definitely – although I think I’ll need a couple of days to recover from the Post-Exertional Malaise (that comes with CFS/ME).

What I’m pondering is putting together a trio of workshops on the same format but across three different venues. Where those will be will depend on any sponsoring community or campaign group willing and able to organise venues and transport. Rock Road Library in Cambridge is within walking distance for me, so getting a box of books and workshop materials to the venue was fairly straight forward – although the box somehow managed to break on the way back!

I also need to vary the times and days of the week to ensure a wider demographic. Not least because as I learnt recently, housing tenure, job/profession/vocation, and income levels have a direct impact on an individual’s relationship with, and their expectations from councils and public services. Any community learning event series needs to accommodate for this.

Would you like a similar workshop in your part of our city?

You can:

  • Leave a comment on The Cambridge Town Owl on F-Book
  • Email me antonycarpen [at[ gmail [dot] com
  • If you are a member of a constituted community or local campaign group, or a residents’ association (See FeCRA here to see if you have one where you live), invite one of the constituted officers to get in touch with me and we can see if we can arrange one in a community centre, library, or other publicly-accessible venue in your part of our city.

You can also contact your local city/district councillors or county councillor if anything in this post is on something you want to know more about on the future of our city. See https://www.writetothem.com/ – the site will tell you who your councillors are from your postcode. The more of us who become familiar with how decisions are made in politics, the greater the collective influence people can have. Because for better or worse, it was that collective influence that put an end to the GCP’s proposals for congestion charging. That also provides us with a collective challenge to come up with alternatives – whether policies created within the existing governance structures, or ones that involve completely new structures altogether.

Food for thought?

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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