Three years ago, I wrote: “Cambridge Ahead will need a strategy to engage with non-members in order to deliver on its vision & purpose.” That is even more important today given the prominent role it plays in local and regional policy-making
As I wrote in the introduction to that blogpost, You can read about Cambridge Ahead here, and can browse through their member organisations here.
This blogpost is not about discussing the merits or otherwise of who Cambridge Ahead are, or what they lobby for. That’s for a separate discussion – and one possibly for the political parties and their elected councillors to lead on. I’m taking the view in this post that, like the University of Cambridge, it exists, has been around for some time give-or-take several centuries, and has significant links and connections to national and international organisations of influence. Or their member organisations do. Therefore, at some stage if you want to influence the future of our city, you will stumble across them.
Cambridge Ahead are able to commission and publish public policy research that influences local public policy decision-making
That statement is a value-neutral one. One of the reports published in 2023 was a particularly good one – their City of Quarters Report which I wrote about here. To their credit, the people representing Cambridge Ahead have not stayed silent on the issues of housing, environment, transport, and things like the water crisis that affect our city and surrounding villages. At the same time, it and their member institutions need more scrutiny – whether questioning the detail within their public policy reports, through to who ultimately gets to decide what their corporate policies are. But then the same goes for the University of Cambridge and its member institutions.
As former councillor Sam Davies MBE wrote:
As we know, there are influential bodies at all levels who are vocal in their support of stimulating further employment growth in Greater Cambridge:
- National government is moving ahead with the ‘OxCam Arc‘;
- The Combined Authority supports the findings of the Cambridgeshire & Peterborough Independent Economic Review (CPIER) that the area should seek to double its Gross Value Added by 2040;
- The Greater Cambridge Partnership’s mission is to deliver up to £500million of infrastructure improvements to “boost growth”; and
- Exclusive business groups like Cambridge Ahead use their resources to lobby for the “advancement” of the Cambridge regional economy.
So it’s no surprise that the ’employment led’ approach to defining housing need has prevailed.
Above – Cllr Sam Davies MBE 28 Sept 2021
As we later saw, national government dropped their support for the OxCamArc only for the incoming Labour Government to bring it back to life. Although it must be noted that in Labour’s case, they see the Ox Cam Arc within the context of an historical policy tradition of large-scale strategic planning with clearly-established regional structures as they had during the governments of Harold Wilson, Tony Blair, and Gordon Brown.
Sadly for all three of them, they were never able to implement their plans for regional government because by the time they were ready to do so, the party political cycle had moved on, or someone somewhere had thrown a spanner in the works. In the case of Harold Wilson it was losing the 1970 general election which stopped the implementation of Redcliffe-Maud’s recommendations, and in the case of Tony Blair it was the rejection of the North East Assembly in 2004 in a referendum that in the grand scheme of things did not need to happen. Like with the EU Referendum, in a system where Parliament is Sovereign, in hindsight Prescott should have just got on and done it.
By 2010 Eric Pickles and co came in and got rid of the entire tier of regional government including regional planning, which in hindsight did a huge amount of damage to large infrastructure planning, the results of which we are now beginning to appreciate – and which is why Matthew Pennycook MP and colleagues are moving at speed to get the new unitary councils and combined authorities implemented long before the next general election.
The absence of evidence bases
One of the reasons for Cambridge Ahead stepping up to commission the evidence bases to help them make the case for the growth of Cambridge is because the sorts of in-depth studies that were commissioned to underpin things like the East of England Plan in 2010 (which I wrote about here) were no longer being commissioned. In order to make the case to the post-2010 ministers from a private sector business perspective someone had to build up that network and commission the evidence bases following the removal of the regional tiers. And as things stand, those reports from Cambridge Ahead are both important *and* they justify greater publicity and scrutiny from the wider city – not least because of the private nature of the institution. For example, those on the left wing of Labour will notice there is minimal if any trade union representation on Cambridge Ahead.
Is there a case for the larger trade unions to subscribe to the organisation and send their full time regional officers to their meetings?
“Our 51 members represent a working population of approximately 40,000 people in the Cambridge area.”
Which is all well and good, but how do those 40,000 people get to hold Cambridge Ahead to account? For example:
- Do the employees or individuals making up the members of CA get to cross-examine their firms’ representatives before and after CA meetings?
- Do the employees or individuals concerned get to vote at mandating meetings to give their consent to whatever the policies are that the CA delegates will be voting on?
“That’s the sort of thing you’d get in a trade union, not a business association or lobby group”
The point is that the website is implying that CA represents tens of thousands of people – but how can they if there are no accountability structures to enable those individuals to scrutinise what’s being done in their name?
“Most people have got other pressing commitments”
Which gets to the heart of the accountability issue. And that is also reflected in two of the most important (to me!) projects that CA have project groups constituted for:
Click on each of the above to see which individuals of which firms/organisations are on each group. For each of the two, there are a particular disempowered group of people who are not represented and who are conspicuous by their absence.
In the case of transport, passenger groups. In the case of skills, the learners
It should be a basic premise that any board, group, committee or collective that is trying to improve the functioning of something in a society should have the beneficiaries represented in the decision-making and policy-making processes.
“Do we have any existing groups that could fulfil those functions?”
Not really – because of the impacts of austerity, the lockdowns, the economic uncertainty and also Cambridge’s high population turnover. And this relates directly to what Andy Haldane of the RSA was saying about declining social capital and the need to reverse those declines. The closest group that might be able to represent the interests of passengers is the Cambridgeshire Sustainable Travel Alliance here. We don’t have (as far as I am aware) a local learners union – not helped by the lack of a specialist large civic lifelong learning centre from within which such a union might evolve. (The only thing I can find from the National Union of Students regarding mature students is here – and the needs of say adult apprentices, basic skills learners, and/or career-switchers may not be best represented by an institution that primarily serves the under-25s).
One of the reasons for suggesting permanent regional trade union officers as members is that as already-salaried persons, they would be best placed to engage in the short term. Especially for the larger trade unions with bigger memberships, they are more likely to have the resources and the personnel to commit to such meetings versus someone who is unpaid. And it should not have to be an unpaid person or volunteers who have to be the ones who have to go head-to-head with some of the highly-paid, highly-qualified/high calibre people who are on those project boards.
In the longer term – assuming Cambridge Ahead continue as they are, it would be good to see ordinary residents representing the interests of both passengers and learners respectively being able to influence policy. How many people on the transport group are dependent on catching a bus to get into work every day? You can sort of see what I’m getting at. Furthermore, if we are talking about building social capital and building up the soft skills of our fellow citizens who live for example in council or social housing, it makes sense to pay them for their time and also provide paid learning and training opportunities for them so that over time we create a growing pool of people who grew up in our city and county, who didn’t necessarily go to university or into a highly-paid job, but who can provide the essential insights to decision-making forums that might nip in the bud any problems that may emerge. Because that lack of diversity in decision-making forums can have catastrophic consequences – as the Government found out during the pandemic and as exposed at the CV19 Inquiry.
“What does success look like?”
In this case with all other things being equal/constant, having several representatives from working class communities in Cambridge representing public transport passengers, representing mature learners, and representing apprentices, all participating in the discussions and meetings. Furthermore, having them all paid and remunerated for paid training they undertake, with the representatives rotating once every three years. For example having three representatives for passengers, and one being replaced every year so that the corporate memory is maintained while at the same time there is the build-up of people from under-represented backgrounds who familiarise themselves with systems and processes that they can then apply in other areas. Remember that the people I have in mind here are people who may never have heard of Cambridge Ahead, don’t know what the first thing about public policy processes are, but who can tell you where all the pinch points on the main bus routes into town are, why they emerge, and provide suggestions on how to resolve them.
Furthermore, the soft/social results would, I hope see more people from the networks that Cambridge Ahead members circulate in, branching out to supporting wider community level events such as the Arbury Carnival, and some of the corporate members choosing to invest in long term support for the event, not because they want a commercial return, but because it’s for the collective good of the wider city. And given the cancellation of both the Big Weekend and the Strawberry Fair in 2025, the wealthy networks in our city have already got a lot of soul-searching to do as it is in our hideously unequal city.
Who is going to be the first to get in touch with the organisers of the Arbury Carnival? Who is willing to invest in the long term personal relationships with the community activists there already working on the ground?
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Below: Radical Leadership by the New Local think tank – some of you may recognise the name of the author
The Cambridge Town Owl 