Only this has dragged on for long enough – and the county already has a huge shortage of display space for historical and archaeological finds from recent infrastructure projects. Yet this is a symptom of a wider malaise in local government not just in our county, but nationwide.
“Future of Shire Hall in question again after sale not completed by deadline”
I’ve been following this for longer than is sensible – note my question to county councillors from 25 May 2018 also had the Mill Road Library on the agenda too!
Above – Cambridgeshire County Council’s Commercial and Investment Committee 25 May 2018. You can see the meeting papers and minutes here.
A reminder of some of the points Cllr Raynes provided at the meeting in response to my questions:
“First, is that we want to consider the site in the round, and to that end this Committee
has halted previous plans to separately dispose of no. 42 Castle Street, the old
police station, registry office, so that they can be considered as part of an overall
masterplan for the site.
“Secondly, we don’t intend to dispose of the part of the site which is a scheduled
ancient monument, but there may be creative options for partnering with or
delegating to other organisations the day-to-day management.
“Thirdly, we want the future use of this site, including access arrangements and
design, and I hope this is in line to where the question is coming from, to enhance
the overall historic offer and attractiveness to tourists of the Castle Hill area, which
has a number of other important historic features and attractions. Our current assessment is that a completely new museum is unlikely to be financially sustainable, so we will be focussing our efforts on conversations about how to make the most of the site in partnership with existing organisations, and exploring the contribution that a new occupier of the Shire Hall building might be able to make.
“Fourthly, we want to work collaboratively on options for the future of the site with other partners, including partners that have been mentioned by Mr Carpen.
“Lastly, this work is being taken forward as part of a distinct workstream within the overall programme, to ensure it receives the level of attention it deserves, and specialist County Hall staff will be engaged in that workstream, people who really know about the heritage, know about the museum economy and ecology of Cambridgeshire and so on.”
Obviously the delights of the General Election 2019, the pandemic, and Brexit happened – which meant that the business climate was hardly great for anyone to take over anything. Hence:
- January 2023 – Please can we have our Shire Hall back?
- November 2023 – Can we have our Shire Hall back please?
- July 2024 – Another preferred bidder
Back in mid-2023 the leader of the Conservative Opposition made some comments about what he could and could not say publicly about the Shire Hall site – reported in CambsNews here.
“How much is the site valued at?”
TL/DR? £45million
This is where you have to go digging, and/or keep watch on the meetings. Given how poorly-resourced local media is, there’s little surprise that such things get buried and forgotten about.
“It was public knowledge at that time that a bid in the region of £45M had been received which could fund essential services, and it would be interesting to compare that with the current bid, along with the subsequent costs of maintaining the building and marketing the site.”
Without a bailout from central government, there is no way the county council is going to convert an asset like that into something that won’t make a substantial income stream to deal with the financial hole left by the construction of New Shire Small Dull Grey Office Block commissioned by the county council when controlled by the Cambridgeshire Conservatives. (You can tell I don’t like the building – not least because I can’t get there and back in a reasonable time on public transport.)
We’ve been here before.
To repeat what I posted earlier in July 2024: “I have called for the old Assizes Court to be rebuilt and expanded to house an expanded Museum of Cambridge because back in 2019 Cambridgeshire County Council’s own archaeologists said they lack public display space. The current car parks – which are on the site of where the demolished court house (below) used to be could be built on again.“
Above – the old Assizes Court House – Museum of Cambridge. Note the ornate street lamp and the bus stop outside – along with the lost statues on the roof representing Justice, Liberty, Power and Truth. I’d love to see them back up there.
The Shire Hall Shambles is only one of several failures of public service management that has its roots in our broken structures and systems
- Shire Hall Shambles – a reflection of a fragmented, underfunded, and under-powered local councils
- Over-concentration of further education places for our older teenagers (16-19 year olds) which is the result of successive policy failures by ministers since the early 1990s
- Addenbrooke’s A&E way beyond capacity – ditto, with very weak institutional and day-to-day working relationships with the organisations that could and should be supporting it (plus an over-dependence on, and an over-exposure to ministers and national politics).
Those are all strategic failures where the buck stops at ministerial desks. If Ministers were serious about devolution they could do it in a manner that *actually reduces their workload*.
County Councils have long been unable to found their own further education colleges. In their wisdom (or otherwise), John Major’s Government took away what powers they might have had and invested them with ministers. See Section 16 of the Further and Higher Education Act 1992. It turns out that the reference – which I got from a ministerial response to a question sent in by my local MP Daniel Zeichner, then in opposition (and now a minister himself at Defra), which stated ministers had to sign off any proposals for lifelong learning colleges, applied to further education colleges too.
And that’s a problem for Cambridge Regional College because in conversation with some of their staff, they told me that their King’s Hedges Campus – opened in 1993 to much relief after the years in ‘temporary’ mobile classrooms and former primary schools – are now operating above the capacity it was designed for.
Above – the triangular-shaped King’s Hedges Road campus of Cambridge Regional College
Ministers could relieve themselves of the burden by devolving it all to local government.
The problem is that ministers and senior civil servants at The Treasury and the Department for Education are unwilling to let go of the purse strings.
Ministers cannot rely on charity and goodwill from the private sector to fill the funding gaps
That was the impression I came away with from the Cambridge2030 event at ARM earlier this week.
Above – scroll halfway down from my previous blogpost to see what was covered
To summarise:
Local government in and around Cambridge should be structured in a manner where co-ordination and co-operation between different public services is routine – demonstrated by a critical mass of decision-makers knowing who to get in touch with when dealing with a challenge that cuts across more than one public service area
If a city like Cambridge cannot preserve its municipal history, then what hope does the rest of the country have? The Shire Hall site should – along with the Mill Road Library site be put into an historic trust to safeguard it from the volatility of local and national government – with an independent income stream that is a fraction of things like the combined revenues of donations to the colleges to taxes on tourism (whether day-trippers via light rail underground tickets, to hotel rooms), to ‘a penny on the rates’ as they used to say in the olden days!
Local government must have the powers to establish training institutions – and have the powers to tax firms and individuals making their fortunes here mindful that industry is not investing nearly enough in their own workforces. Cambridgeshire & Peterborough should have established new schools for dentistry and town planning through Anglia Ruskin University. Why is it unable to do so? What are the financial barriers? What are the legal barriers?
Anyway, we get to talk lots about these things in the run up to the county council and mayoral elections. Whether any of it will get much media coverage is another matter. Someone has to force the issue. And if politicians can’t do it…
Don’t
You
Dare
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Below – talking of community action, Let’s Go Fly The Kite with Together Culture
The Cambridge Town Owl 