Dr Nik Johnson confirms he will be standing down following delivery of bus franchising for the CPCA area in a term of office that saw him undergo heart surgery
You can read the full statement here on his FB page and here on CambsNews.
Nearly four years ago in May 2021, Cambridgeshire and Peterborough experienced an electoral shock as the Conservatives lost political control of Cambridgeshire County Council and the Combined Authority Mayoralty
I wrote about it here as the new electoral map for Cambridgeshire showed a strong dividing line across the county, one that helped make the case for those of us who said that the two economic sub-regions should not have been squished together by George Osborne.
Above – state of the county as the dust settled in early May 2021
Trying to govern with minority support on the Combined Authority Board and a disinterested set of rapidly-rotating ministers in a crumbling government
I’m not going to go into the details of who accused whom of what, and what the disciplinary outcomes were for mayors and councillors past and present – those are on public record for you to judge accordingly.
I don’t like the concept of Combined Authorities as a concept for the simple fact that there is no directly-elected legislature to hold the chief decision-maker to account. It remains to be seen what ministers have planned for the tier of government significantly expanded by the Conservative-led governments when the new Devolution Bill is published.
In terms of the top-level achievement, Nik has achieved what he set out to do in the most difficult set of circumstances – bringing the buses effectively back under public control – i.e. it is an institution of the state that will decide on the bus routes, not the business requirements of Stagecoach. That Grant Shapps’ Bus Services Act 2017 required such a convoluted process to go through in order to get to this stage also speaks volumes about unwilling his party was to undo the catastrophic bus privatisation and deregulation policies of the 1980s. It will be up to Nik’s successor to implement the agreement that he and his team worked tirelessly to get over the line.
Nik benefited from having some behind-the-scenes support from the Mayor of Greater Manchester Andy Burnham – a former Labour MP & Health Secretary, and before that a student at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge (See his interview here with Varsity back in June 2023). Greater Manchester’s Combined Authority is several years older, covers a much greater population, has more powers, and is more advanced than Cambridgeshire & Peterborough’s one. Given that they went through an even more convoluted process of bus franchising, the lessons learnt from Manchester were ones well-learnt here – and that co-operation between the two Mayors and their teams was probably the difference between getting the Nik’s franchising agreement signed off before the elections in May 2025.
A year after I came out of Royal Papworth, Nik Johnson went in
Dr Nik Johnson took leave to undergo a procedure at one of the best heart hospitals in the world – which also happened to be in the CPCA area and also on the edge of my neighbourhood as well. This also meant that Cllr Anna Smith (Labour – Coleridge), who had recently been ousted as leader of Cambridge City Council but who was appointed to serve both as Deputy Mayor and Chair of the Transport and Infrastructure Committee, became Acting Mayor for that time period.
Given the stress of the office, I can’t say I’m too surprised at Nik’s decision not to re-stand. Furthermore, given the scale of the defeat for the Conservatives in the 2024 general election, the campaigning infrastructure that the Labour MPs in North West Cambs and also Peterborough (Messrs Carling & Pakes respectively) also deny their Conservative opponents those same resources – ideal for Nik’s successor. That said, both main parties remain vulnerable to a challenge from TeamNigel – but it’s unlikely to be enough to counter the votes from the more liberal-left-leaning south of the county.
The months that followed the 2024 General Election gave a hint of what it’s like to have senior ministers actively supporting a Combined Authority Mayor
Given how centralised the UK is as a country – and England in particular, all political eyes lead to Whitehall and Westminster. The same goes for career prospects for public servants. I spent nearly five years working in London, a couple of which I lived there in the big smoke. You learn lots and it changes you. And for whoever wins the mayoral election in May, the now routine and regular meetings with senior ministers as part of the National Council of Mayors will inevitably raise the profile of the roles and occupants further. Especially as the CPCA is both a ‘junior’ authority given population size vs its counterparts, but also at the same time high profile because of the university city with a globally-recognised name that sits within it.
Little progress on adult education and lifelong learning
Light rail aside, my big disappointment over the past four years has been the lack of meaningful progress on adult education and lifelong learning. Obviously this has to be seen in the context of the very limited funding – almost a trickle, coming from central government that insisted on retaining control of what that money got spent on. Hence the CPCA was little more than a commissioning body for a pot of money that someone else had written the policy rules for, rather than an institution that could raise its own money via taxation, and decide what it wanted to spend the revenues on and where.
I’d have liked to have seen a stronger steer from both Nik and the Combined Authority chairpersons – elected councillors on this. Their responses to my public questions showed that the institution was not willing to push far beyond the limits that their current budgets had placed upon them. This despite my urging them to meet with the owners and tenants on large employment sites to see what additional activities and facilities they might be willing to contribute towards.
House of Lords putting pressure on ministers over lifelong learning
The Lords held a debate last week (Thurs 06 Feb 2025) on lifelong learning – you can see the transcript here. And this for me is going to become a growing public policy area simply because of demographic change. It also magnifies the error made by previous generations of politicians in bringing in the present fees regime while at the same time allowing the housing crisis to get to the stage we’re in.
“However, the levels of debt that young people carry as they start out in work remains a problem for as long as we stick to the three-phase life.
- What if university was something we kept returning to throughout our working lives to enable us to pivot our careers?
- What if we then had a business model more like subscribing to membership of a university over many years, rather than a debt-financed, one-off degree front-loading a long working life?
Part of necessary HE reform has to include new financial models based on lifelong learning that allow us to escape the burden of debt that is putting people off going to our great universities.”
Lord Knight of Weymouth, Col.900
Lord Knight also highlighted a different vision for further education too.
“Further Education must be positioned as a more universal service for adults both young and old. Colleges should be at the heart of our communities and our local and regional economies.
In many ways, we should see them as the platform from which to access a range of learning from the college itself, but also family learning, the University of the Third Age, the OU, other HE in hybrid form, the Workers’ Educational Association and so on.
Further Education could also be the entry point for most businesses. We organise our skills system to meet the needs of large employers, yet less than a fifth of us work for these big businesses. FE should be where most businesses go to help them develop the talent pipelines that they need to compete and flourish.”
Lord Knight of Weymouth, Col.901
Which is what Dorothy Enright noticed in Cambridge a hundred years ago and decided to do something about.
I’ll leave the last word to the Minister – Baroness Jacqui Smith:
“It is the case that we need more devolution so that the nations and regions can make effective decisions about education which best reflect their needs. This will ensure value for money in spending resources and enable localised benefits in the opportunities of adult learning.”
It remains to be seen if that devolution extends to revenue raising powers to pay for a renaissance in lifelong learning – one that the Education Select Committee called for back in 2020.
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Below – should you wish to get involved in local discussions on possible unitaries, see the Cambs Unitaries Campaign at https://www.cambsunitaries.org.uk/
The Cambridge Town Owl 