Campaigners meet to oppose the GCP’s proposed busway from Addenbrooke’s to the A11

…which barely goes halfway to Haverhill – yet for reasons only they can explain, councillors from all three main parties approved the proposals at various stages from GCP officers to get to where we are – which is the submission of the application to the Department for Transport

The Greater Cambridge Partnership Assembly meets at 2pm at The Guildhall on Thurs 20th Feb 2025 – you can see the meeting papers here.

Great Shelford Hall – CSET Meeting organised by Better Ways for Busways

You can watch the video here filmed by Will Bannell, a former Independent candidate for Romsey at the city council elections in May 2024 where he stood on a platform to oppose the GCP’s and county council’s plans to oppose the traffic restrictions over Mill Road Bridge.

Important contributions:

James Littlewood’s presentation
Party political contributions following Mr Littlewood’s presentation
- Miranda Fyfe (Cambridge & South Cambs Green Party)
- Paul Bristowe (Former Conservative MP for Peterborough 2019-24, CPCA Mayoral candidate)
- Peter Fane (Liberal Democrats, Great Shelford, Stapleford and Little Shelford)
- Questions and Answers session
- Cllr Brian Milne (LibDems – Sawston, and South Cambridgeshire District Council’s representative on the GCP Board 2023-ono) followed by Jim Chisholm (Transport campaigner in the local area for nearly half a century)

“Busways instead of light rail again?”

Exactly. To give you an idea of how long I’ve been following the campaign to get the railway reinstated, below is a picture from April 2014 of Puffles the Dragon Fairy (my old Twitter mascot and avatar) at Haverhill Arts Centre

Above – Puffles with Rail Haverhill back in 2014 (for more details see Rail Haverhill here)

It goes without saying that there are also the Connect Cambridge proposals to have a light rail line going from Haverhill to Addenbrooke’s to Cambridge to Cambourne. It’s possible to have both – I’m not fussy. See also the following videos:

The GCP’s plans for Haverhill were torn to bits by Rail Future East at their AGM in December 2024 which I wrote about here – something that was preceded by my public question to the GCP a few months earlier.

I’m not going to add anything more than I already have – it has been over a decade! I remain opposed to the GCP’s plans. I think that successive boards under all political parties (from the Conservative-led ones in the mid-2010s, to all three represented in the late 2010s to the Lib-Lab boards post-2021) should have gone back to ministers and requested extra funding and land value uplift levy powers to help pay for the light rail solution. Again, for whatever reasons the councillors and the political parties at the time did not do this despite me prodding them repeatedly.

The groups who are campaigning for alternatives to the CSET plans include:

You can also contact any of your local councillors on this, and your MP as well now that the application is going to go to the Transport Secretary for the final decision.

County council and combined authority elections

When the candidates are announced sometime in March 2025 (so not long to go!) you will be able to find out who is standing for election where you live by typing your postcode into https://whocanivotefor.co.uk/

Given the extensive period of time that the proposals have been developed by the Greater Cambridge Partnership, councillors from all three of the main parties will have approved and signed off the recommendations to proceed to the next stage of the development for the CSET busway. Furthermore, both Michael Gove’s Case for Cambridge which I wrote about here, and Housing Minister Matthew Pennycook’s proposals which seem to be continuing with similarly large ambitions, both stated that their policy was to establish a development corporation for Cambridge.

Therefore, exercise caution when looking to cast your vote on the basis of a single issue alone

Instead, look at the powers and functions that the candidates for public office are looking to gain, and ask them not just about policies, but also things like how they will keep your communities informed about what is going on, and on how they will balance community interest versus party political interests. Ask similar questions of all of the candidates, listen to their responses, and judge accordingly. The more people who proactively get in touch with all of the candidates, the stronger the messages and the collective feeling of the local electorate will be, and the greater the likelihood that whoever wins will reflect that at council meetings.

If you are interested in the longer term future of Cambridge, and on what happens at the local democracy meetings where decisions are made, feel free to: