Trust me to spot the thing at 20 minutes to midnight…
It’s being debated by the Cambridgeshire & Peterborough Health and Wellbeing Board on 11 October 2024 at Peterborough Town Hall [You’re a city – you have a cathedral down the road from your council’s HQ!]
“I didn’t know we had a health and wellbeing board!”
Well you do now – and they seem to bounce between Alconbury just outside Huntingdon and Peterborough for their meetings. Which looks awful for ‘best small city in world’ Cambridge.
“Why don’t they meet in Cambridge?”
Because the County Tories don’t like Cambridge and moved the County Council out ages ago. Which reminds me, still no news on what’s happening to the old Shire Hall site – we might get an update in one of the meetings this month (Oct 2024 – see the meetings calendar here).
Prior to that meeting on the day before will be the Adults and Health Committee of Cambridgeshire County Council – also discussing the health of Cambridge in a pokey little bland building in Alconbury. (The new residents there deserved something ***so much better***)
Which is all the more fun given that the Cambridge Biomedical Campus is hosting a meeting about its future next to one of the ugliest buildings in Cambridge on its campus – the AbCam building and the meeting will be opposite it at 1000 Discovery Drive. Which is a very 1990s name for a road. It’s on 23 October, 6pm – 7:30pm – more details here. I’m torn between turning up or having another futile one-bloke-protest outside complaining about ugly new buildings.
Above – taken by me on a cycleride a month ago. The meeting will be in the box on the left, the futile moan I might have if I have one will be about the box in the middle and don’t even get me started about the monstrosity hidden behind the road sign.
On that agenda at the biomedical campus will be:
- The CBC Landowners Forum – Their long-term development and expansion aspirations.
- JMS on behalf of Network Rail – Update on the new Cambridge South Station.
- Greater Cambridge Partnership – Cambridge South East Transport (CSET) and Greenway projects.
- Greater Cambridge Shared Planning (GCSP) – latest on current proposals and an update on the Local Plan and guidance document.
Another opportunity for the public to ask questions of the Greater Cambridge Partnership. (I won’t be because I said I wouldn’t in my last blogpost)
All of these follow the big meeting in Peterborough held by Healthwatch Cambridgeshire & Peterborough on poverty and health inequalities – see Kate Moser Andon’s report for BBC Cambridgeshire here. The problems they discussed all have their roots in our broken governance structures and archaic systems – combined with the lack of powers to tax the wealth being generated here. And the inequalities seem to get worse and worse.
“The Collegiate University received over £300 million in philanthropic gifts last year and, importantly, achieved its fundraising target, set in 2018, of £500M for student support. Let me pause over that £500 million, because it has been transformative.”
Cambridge University’s Vice Chancellor Prof Deborah Prentice – 01 Oct 2024
The day after the Vice Chancellor’s announcement I heard from staff at Netherhall School how they created their Bright Future’s Fund to help support their children and students whose families are experiencing childhood poverty and are unable to afford the essentials, let alone take part in some of the things that senior politicians wring their hands over on equality of opportunity in education. Former ward councillor for the school and neighbourhood, Sam Davies MBE – who had to deal with the casework as other local councillors have to do at state schools across our city, was scathing.
Above – maybe I should protest outside the AbCam building instead
But again, the root of it all is Political – which is why it was nice to see their new local MP getting stuck into the work of educating her younger constituents about politics – and just as importantly, their local council.
Above – Pippa Heylings MP (Liberal Democrats – South Cambridgeshire) with students from local village colleges around Cambridge where they got to cross-examine their local councillors on South Cambridgeshire District Council.
Above – I hope this becomes a routine function for council committees where each committee has to hold a meeting at least once a year at a secondary school and take questions from students (so as to share the workload across the district)
Cambridge City Council – look and learn!
Back to the Joint Strategic Needs Assessment
The important thing is that ***the assessment provides the evidence base***
Which is why it is at item 6 of the agenda pack tucked away on page 96
“How on earth is the general public supposed to know it’s there?”
They are not. It’s a sort of structural inertia that goes with institutions – but it’s one that more progressively-minded county councillors are challenging. For example the Chair of Highways and Transport, Cllr Alex Beckett (Liberal Democrats – Queen Edith’s) put out this 2 minute summary video of what the councillors there discussed.
Above – textbook stuff by Cllr Beckett
Additionally, Labour’s Dr Alexandra Bulat (Labour – Abbey), made a short video about how to apply for street improvement funding.
“So who is going to make a short video about the JSNA?”
Not me.
“What does it say?”
You can read the executive summary on p106 of the Agenda Documents Pack here, and judge for yourselves. The wider document is structured into smaller bits to make it easier. The themes cover:
- Demography and Households
- Climate Change
- Built and Natural Environment
- Infrastructure and Services
- Communities and Social Cohesion
Above – from the Agenda Documents Pack, p97
Recommendations from the JSNA
I’m just going to copy and paste (and reformat) the text of the leading recommendations to make it easier on the eye.
Recommendation 1
“Local plans should include policies that account for the current and likely future impacts of climate change. Specifically, local plans should include policies on risk of
- excessive heat,
- flooding
- vector borne disease. Other policies may include
- wildfires,
- aeroallergens,
- food and agriculture,
- drought, and solar radiation.
Climate change as a health risk? Who’d have thought?
Recommendation 2:
“Local plans should include policies that address the health impacts associated with:
- Air pollution (especially around schools and healthcare facilities)
- Noise pollution
- Green spaces (including provision, accessibility, quantum and distance from settlements)
- Provision of accessible and age-appropriate equipment (e.g., seating, play equipment, etc)
- Active travel
- Dwelling design (e.g., home working environment and minimum room sizing)
- Fast food / takeaways (e.g., takeaway exclusion zones, mandatory HIAs for new fast food establishments, or limiting the density of fast food establishments in urban areas)
- Healthy food provision (e.g., community allotments or orchards, edible hedgerows, sites for community farming)
- Suicide prevention (e.g., adopting the principles in Public Health England’s Preventing Suicides in Public Places document, with a specific threshold requiring jumping restrictions to be installed at high -risk locations)
- Healthy ageing and people with disabilities (lifetime homes, age-friendly housing, higher proportion of accessibility standards, or adopting the principles of age-friendly communities)
- Meanwhile uses (e.g., a supportive policy that allows flexible interim uses recognising their benefits meanwhile uses have for social cohesion)
Recommendation 3:
“System partners should collaborate to develop a design guide for health, based on the evidence in this Healthy Places JSNA, to be adopted as a Supplementary Plan (formerly Supplementary Planning Document (SPD) across Cambridgeshire and Peterborough.
Recommendation 4:
“The integrated care system should ensure appropriate Emergency Preparedness, Resilience, and Response [ for when disasters happen – it’s a requirement of the Civil Contingencies Act 2004 IIRC] plans are in place and kept up to date for the major local risks posed to human health by climate change (i.e., major flooding and excessive heat) – and if you want to know what the big risks that central government is planning for, see the National Risk Register 2023 here.
Recommendation 5:
A system-wide task and finish group should be established to develop a place-based scoring system to objectively assess new and existing localities and developments, including the healthier street principles. This scoring system should include specific consideration of children and young people, older adults, and people with disabilities. For example, the Place Standard tool used in Scotland.
Above – p107-108
I dread to think how low some of our places will score – especially after 14 years of Tory Austerity.
The pages that follow explore the recommendations in more depth. These include ones I think are important but are not captured in the summaries.
Above – note 1.5: “Local Plans should, where possible, include a policy requiring major, mixed use new developments to co-locate housing with local employment opportunities.”
That’s actually ***really important*** because belatedly the Cambridge Biomedical Campus acknowledged this in their 2024 refresh of their 2050 vision – which I wrote about recently here. The concept of building sector-specific employment sites in large, out-of-town low-density parks that are primarily served by motor-car-based transport and being places where people work and work only, is now obsolete. Even more so with the development of the X-minute City inspite of the disinformation spread about them. People don’t want to waste time stuck in traffic jams or undertaking unnecessarily long journeys to get to places they need to be at regularly. (I despised long-distance commuting with a passion – it destroyed my physical health for a start).
The Joint Strategic Needs Assessment re-connects town planning with public health, and also embeds preventative-based healthcare into mainstream working
The challenge is whether central government will provide the money, powers, and leadership needed to enable local areas to get on with carrying out the recommendations. It cannot be done micromanaged from Whitehall. Which is also why a critical mass of residents across the county from a wide range of backgrounds need to familiarise themselves with this if it is to be a success. It can’t be left to the employees of the institutions. As with the responses to the climate emergency:
This involves everyone.
Food for thought?
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The Cambridge Town Owl 