‘You can’t build the biggest employment site in Cambridge and not have a lifelong learning centre on it’

…especially when so many of your tenant and member organisations are struggling to recruit suitably qualified staff to fill vacancies

This was the point I put to the representatives of the Cambridge Biomedical Campus following their speeches at the Queen Edith’s Community Forum AGM earlier. (See my previous blogpost)

The exclusive institutional culture of the University is one that is very hard to shake off – despite the best efforts of some very talented figures over the past 150 years.

One of the contemporary reasons for this is that there is *a lot of money* to be made from selling that exclusive brand of Cambridge. More than a few property developers have used the phrase ‘Be part of it’ when marketing their developments – oblivious to the fact that over half of the people in the city will never be able to afford to buy or rent at the prices being quoted due to the ongoing international property bubble of which Cambridge has long been a part of. And with Parliament being sovereign, it is up to ministers to table the legislation in Parliament to deal with the negative externalities of that bubble, taxing and taming that demand through a variety of policy measures. The problem is successive ministers and governments have chosen not to use them. This is not a challenge that a district council designed and resourced to run a market town could possibly cope with.

Back to the Biomedical Campus

During my commuting days, much of the site was all fields. The non-Addenbrooke’s and the non-Rosie parts anyway. Nine years ago I got to go along to see the early building foundations when the then Chief Secretary to the Treasury Danny Alexander MP gave this speech in Cambridge back in 2015. I don’t think any of us could have predicted the state of politics would be a decade later back then. How time flies. What I didn’t spot at the time was the lack of lifelong learning provision in the expansion plans.

‘Without a renaissance in lifelong learning, Cambridge’s economy and society will crumble’

I wrote the above back in September 2023 noting that lots of people in lots of influential firms and institutions were complaining continually about Cambridge’s skills shortages (along with the housing shortages) while at the same time doing precious little to actually solve the problem. Why didn’t anyone insist on having a new lifelong learning college on the site? Here we come back to our broken governance structures – ones that go beyond political institutions too.

• Lack of local political leadership – the county council was five years into austerity, being run by a minority Conservative administration while being propped up by *twelve* UKIP councillors whose main policy was minimising council tax rises above all else
• Lack of national political leadership – Even with the best will in the world, no local political leader would have been able to get much done under the current structure given that funding and legal approval for new lifelong learning institutions reside with ministers, not with local government as in the olden days. (I ended up asking Daniel Zeichner, who won the Cambridge seat from Dr Julian Huppert, if he could get answers from ministers about who had the legal powers to commission and fund new institutions – and the now Education Secretary signed off the response confirming it was a ministerial responsibility)
• Lack of corporate leadership in the private sector – It has been a politically trendy thing for the past half century or so to say ‘leave it to the market – business will sort it out’. That principle has been tested to destruction and has been found wanting. The climate emergency tells us that. Again, despite the best efforts of some very talented individuals that I’ve met over the past couple of decades, the collective failure of both the large and wealthy employers to gather together and come up with a substantial offer to civic society and local government on co-funding a lifelong learning institution is striking. Even more so because 100 years ago in 1924, a pioneering teacher called Dorothy Enright arrived from London to become the first woman principal of a technical college in England when she took over the Cambridgeshire School of Arts, Craft, and Technology – later CCAT, APU, and today Anglia Ruskin University on East Road. That wasn’t the only reason why her appointment was significant. She surveyed every major employer in and around Cambridge to ask them what their training needs were.
• The lack of effective communication between employers, training providers, and residents – this was something that came up at the Queen Edith’s Community Forum meeting when Gill Wilson of CBC Ltd said that everyone is producing newsletters but no one is reading them because we are all so busy. It also reflects the decline in popular local news media that in previous generations used to have everything in a specific section on a specific day of the week in the daily newspaper – back during my childhood it was the Cambridge Evening News

‘We want everyone to feel welcome on our campus’

…was the enthusiastic message from Ms Wilson. (You can watch her speech and that of Mr Day, here). Which is all well and good, but there are a few challenges involved.

1. For us longterm residents who grew up with Addenbrooke’s always being there, we knew that a) it was very reassuring to have such a world class hospital on our doorstep, but also b) no one wanted to find themselves in a situation where they were in accident and emergency or admitted as an in-patient, as I have found out the hard way.
2. One off ‘cultural’ or ‘arts’ events are not the sort of thing that can sustain a meaningful relationship between the institutions on the site and the people of our city – in particular those living in walking/cycling distance.
3. At present, there is *nothing* on the site that would have me voluntarily going there on a weekly basis. Because the decision-makers so far have not created anything for ordinary residents who otherwise don’t have a reason to be there – e.g. to listen to a specialist lecture on a very complex subject that requires at least degree-level knowledge in a science subject

“Give us some reasons to go onto your site”

‘Eating, drinking, yoga…!’

Above: “I see myself as more of an intermediate actually!” James Nesbitt from the old Yellow Pages advert from the 1990s

I cringed at the mention of it – not because of anything against yoga or those that take part in classes that are dotted about all over the city, but more because of how so many sci-tech developers use ‘yoga classes’ as a tick-box item to demonstrate community activities, while at the same time not actually providing nearly enough indoor hall space for decent-sized classes and workshops to take place. It’s also my big issue with Eddington – and the Storey’s Field Centre where the main hall fails my ballpark/shuttle-cock ‘must fit at least two badminton courts inside it to be big enough’ standard. Combined with the move by Cambridge University decision-makers to exclude council house provision from Eddington the culture within the University of Cambridge and its colleges *as institutions* demonstrates a contempt for the people who make up our city (including commuters commuting in) – and shows a complete lack of civic responsibility that is being compounded further by the scandal of the long-delayed Cambridge University Swimming Pool. The University is required to build it as a condition of the planning permission for the whole of the Eddington site. They say they have not received planning permission but as far as I am aware ***they have not submitted a detailed planning application for the local planning authority to consider***

“Planning officers are still talking to the university. But the delivery of housing at Eddington was meant to contribute toward the swimming pool. The developer contribution s106 money had to be used within seven years and that is coming up in June.

“If they don’t use the money by June, then they would need to negotiate with the planners about keeping it for a future swimming pool.

“I would be very disappointed if the pool is not built – it would be a blow for the whole city.”

Cllr Katie Thornburrow (Lab – Petersfield) – Executive Councillor for Planning, Cambridge City Council in Cambridge Independent, 12 Feb 2024

It’s not just councillors and residents that have issues – the students are complaining too.

“It costs members of the Blues swimming team “around £600 per academic year” to subscribe to the team because of pool hire costs, whereas Oxford swimmers pay £90 a year,”

“The absolute necessity of a University sports centre has not diminished over the years. Instead, it continues to grow. It grows each year with the rising cost of pool hire, now so great that the Swimming and Water Polo Club cannot afford a coach.”

Ellie Mason, the Cambridge University Swimming and Water Polo Club (CUSWPC) Junior President, in Varsity, 25 Jan 2024

The issue is likely to be featured on BBC Radio Cambridgeshire on Monday Morning (26 Feb 2024) with Dotty McLeod. If you miss the show, you can catch up online here.

Could ministers bring in a new ‘Duty to co-operate’?

This takes me back to my early London days in the civil service in late 2006 when having crashed and burned in a series of promotion interviews in the Cambridge office, I somehow succeeded in the hardest one which was the in-service Fast Stream (which also had the biggest pay rise too). It was tough because the Cambridge office was going through a redundancy programme and it was the younger and/or less academically qualified admin staff that took the hit. Until the news of the Fast Stream result came through, I was in the same boat as many of them. I recall how it was really badly handled – and it was even worse when the Coalition’s cuts came in four years later. I assumed it would take several months for the transfer to go through, but I was told I was starting in two weeks. ‘Hitting the ground running, and running very fast’ was how I described it at the time. And it involved working up the policy detail of the Strong and Prosperous Communities White Paper by Ruth Kelly, who succeeded John Prescott as the Secretary of State in charge of Housing and Local Government. The new system of performance management for local public services involved bringing together all those involved, and negotiating targets and incentives across a range of variables, indicators, and other things. Furthermore, ministers stated in the White Paper that they were going to change the law to force them to work *with* each other in the form of a legal duty to co-operate on meeting those targets and outcomes.

Which makes things much more interesting if you’ve got individuals or institutions that are not helping.

“[The Government] therefore proposes:

• a new duty for the upper-tier local authority (in two-tier areas) or unitary authority to prepare [a formal agreement] in consultation with others;
• a new duty for the local authority and named partners (listed below) to cooperate with each other to agree the targets in the [formal agreement]”

Strong and Prosperous Communities (2006) para 5.26 p99/103

It’s so much more fun when you have a huge institution of state behind you that, if push comes to shove you can recommend to your minister to change the law to make things happen if they become too stubborn!

Now, imagine an elected Unitary Council for ‘Great Cambridge’ [on the grounds that we want to become ‘great’ but are nowhere near that point] and in the cause of improving our city and county, that council had the ability to call on that ‘duty to co-operate’ that was imposed on partner institutions. The resulting Agreement for Cambridgeshire was this one.

Conspicuous by its absence are the higher education institutions and private sector institutions – something that contrasted with the Coalition’s approach with LEPs – which in Cambridgeshire’s case crashed and burned in farcical circumstances. In hindsight, the previous Labour Government needed to overhaul the entire system of local government – but memories of the 1960s and also of the early 1990s were too fresh. Furthermore, ministers wanted to get cracking on a host of issues, the result of 18 years of austerity – and overhauling local government is like turning around an oil tanker. Therefore a number of executive agencies directly responsible to ministers were established under new legislation and managed from regional offices (including the Cambridge one), enabling local level projects to be established that largely bypassed local government.

Inevitably that caused tensions and also led to diseconomies of scale – something that the Strong and Prosperous Communities White Paper acknowledged and tried to reverse by removing a swathe of reporting burdens. But my point remains: wise and competent local leadership is essential, alongside recourse to escalate things to central government if a local publicly-funded body is intentionally hindering the ability of partner organisations from improving public services for the people. At the moment the present structure (along with the general culture of party politics) acts as a massive barrier to sound local leadership, and the policy instability and ministerial turnover in Westminster combined with the out-of-control financial crisis in local government means councillors and others can do little but fire-fight.

“That’s a lot of stuff to get through to make the case for a lifelong learning centre”

Public policy is complex by its very nature. In the case of a lifelong learning centre the amount of information needed by anyone commissioning one is huge. That ranges from the needs and wants of the potential learners (having identified them first), and then the same for potential firms interested in either sending their own staff on day release, to employing those completing courses, all the way through to having non-vocational provision for arts sports, and leisure – creating a civic space that people want to be in and at. Finally, you’ve got to figure out how to get people to and from your site.

If the CBC and its member organisations chose to fund a lifelong learning centre, they could design it in a way to meet a host of existing skills shortages by providing learning opportunities for potential career switchers – alongside the funding and grants as well. The problem is we are nowhere near achieving this. I hope this is one of the local issues that will come up in general election debates.

Food for thought?

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Below – one of the policies that was due to follow Strong and Prosperous Communities was Total Place – which I wrote about here – only it could be making a comeback.