Will there be any time for his party to turn words into actions? Only the next general election has to be called within the next 12 months.
The papers published with the Chancellor’s Autumn Statement are here
“We will invest £32m to bust the planning backlog and develop fantastic new housing quarters in Cambridge, London and Leeds which will lead to many thousands of additional dwellings.”
Chancellor Jeremy Hunt – Statement to House of Commons 22 Nov 2023
In the policy detail – the written documents accompanying the statement, various commentators and local news outlets picked out a few more things.
“Funding will also accelerate the delivery of new high quality housing in Cambridge, Leeds and London.
“As part of this, the government will support the Cambridge Delivery Group to drive the long-term vision for Cambridge by exploring the case for a development corporation. The government is also continuing to progress its commitment to deliver East West Rail, with a statutory consultation due next year”
Cambridge Independent, 22 Nov 2023
“Cambridge Delivery Group? I didn’t vote for them!”
You don’t vote for delivery groups!
“Then how do you become a member?!?!”
Ministers announced it in a press release last July.
“A Cambridge Delivery Group, chaired by Peter Freeman and backed by £5 million, will be established to begin driving forward this project.”
GovUK 24 July 2023
“So…just before Parliament went on their summer holidays so no one could be around to scrutinise it?”
Sounds about right. And normal for Westminster. I picked up on it when it was announced – see this blogpost. The Chair of Homes England – Peter Freeman, who is chairing the CDG (I still have not found a list of members) was also at the Innovate Cambridge event on 11 October which I wrote about here.
So on top of a Cambridge Delivery Group which didn’t seem to put an open call for applications for people to be on it, ministers want a Cambridge Forum for Place that manages to exclude most of the people that live here (thinking in particular those living in social housing, not just opinionated people (e.g. me) who follow these things), and are looking into a development corporation on top of the mess of local governance that you’re all familiar with. And that’s before we look at the various lobbying groups (such as the ex-Health Secretary & MP for South Cambs who has his own developers’ forum) all with their own wealthy vested interests.
None of the above will deal with the chronic shortages ministers imposed via years of austerity on schools, hospitals, and local councils – and also GP and dental services
Dr Ian Sollom – the LibDems’s MP-candidate for the new St Neots & Mid-Cambs constituency picked up on this.
“There was simply nothing on offer in the Chancellor’s statement to help those who can’t get an appointment with a GP or dentist, stuck on a waiting list for diagnosis or surgery, or even unable to get their medicines.”
Dr Ian Sollom, Cambridgeshire Lib Dems in the Cambridge Independent
“Whilst the Chancellor lavished praise on constituencies across the country, his sole mention of the East was for housing development in Cambridge. Hardly reflective of the importance the east of England as a contributor to the UK economy as a whole.”
Ex-Mayor James Palmer – Eastern Powerhouse in Cambridge Independent
“What is a development corporation?”
Essentially it’s a Quango – a Quasi-Autonomous Non-Governmental Organisation – the term becoming familiar (and much-lampooned) in the 1980s & 1990s. Mainly on the grounds that such organisations lacked local democratic legitimacy. But then that’s why they were created by ministers – to override pesky local organisations getting in the way of their policies. In the case of development corporations, they were originally created to facilitate the construction of New Towns after WWII. In the case of Cambridgeshire, Peterborough was designated a Third Generation New Town by Harold Wilson’s Government and thus the Peterborough Development Corporation was created.
“The corporation’s task was to provide homes, work and the full range of facilities and services for an additional 70,000 people, drawn mainly from the Greater London area.”
WikiP citing Hancock, Tom Greater Peterborough Master Plan Peterborough Development Corporation, 1971
Furthermore, as Katie Scuoler states on her blog here, there will be further changes to the powers of development corporations via the Levelling Up Bill – now the Levelling Up and Regeneration Act 2023 given the powers granted in that new piece of legislation. (Scroll down to Part 8 of the Act here)
“The Secretary of State may, by order made by statutory instrument, designate any area of land in England as an urban development area…[and] establish a development corporation for the area in consequence of the proposal”
S171 Levelling Up and Regeneration Act 2023
It will be interesting to see:
- The geographical area that the Secretary of State wishes to designate as coming under the remit of a proposed development corporation – something that would have to go out to consultation (generating the inevitable local protests and electoral impacts that go with it)
- The powers that the Secretary of State proposes granting to the development corporation – along with who gets to be a member of it.
This could have massive electoral consequences for southern Cambridgeshire
For a start, this is a proposal coming from Conservative ministers. Going by their own timetables, the outlines will have to be published before the general election. Which will cause no end of problems to those Conservative MPs and candidates that have already expressed opposition to the existing high growth rates of Cambridge and county.
The challenge for Labour is to define what their alternative proposals are going to be. So far they have said little other than matching the Conservatives on being ‘pro growth’ – but have provided little detail. At present they don’t have to. When an adversary is in a mess and making lots of errors, leave them to it. But Labour cannot do this for too much longer. At some stage they will have to come up with proposals of their own. And given their own historical record with development corporations and the creation of national agencies to override local government, I wouldn’t put it beyond Labour in government to do something similar – if only to get the houses built.
For the Liberal Democrats, again their party history hints at what they could campaign for. In their case they are more pro-local government (which is where their strength tends to be vs Westminster) and have also favoured strengthening local government vs Westminster in previous manifestos. For them, a very clear alternative exists in the Cambs Unitaries proposals – or rather the principle that the campaign is promoting. What the campaign is not doing – and for very good reasons (because it is a cross-party-and-none campaign) is going into the details. For example all it is calling for is an overhaul of local government across Cambridgeshire and Peterborough, with a solution involving at least two unitary councils – nominally centred around Cambridge and Peterborough respectively. Everything else is outside of scope. What the Liberal Democrats won’t be able to do is to leave it at that. They will have to come up with more of the detail including possible boundaries, policies on working with town and parish councils (as I explored here), what public service functions they will have oversight of, and what revenue-raising powers they should have. In a nutshell, a properly-functioning unitary council for ‘Greater Cambridge’ (however defined) should not need a development corporation to sit alongside it.
For the Green Party, their disposition challenges the pro-growth mindset. Neo-liberal style economic growth was one of the things that brought us to the present climate crisis, so therefore more of the same cannot be the solution. Furthermore, the party has repositioned itself as appealing towards those in rural areas that are threatened by large development proposals – and with more than a fair amount of electoral success. The challenge for The Greens is that the core of their party in more recent decades has been positioned on the Green/Red frontline of politics. To what extent will the growth of members and councillor numbers change that balance as more join from the Green/Blue frontline?
Food for thought?
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